Alexandra Huang-Kokina

Alexandra Huang-Kokina is an academic, pianist and creative director whose work bridges music, literature, intermediality and digital creativity through critical and creative practices. Current research interests include collaborative and AI-augmented creativity in the performing arts, and digitally-mediated opera. Past interests include the cultural and intellectual history of Western art music, the literary representation of music, and performance studies more broadly.

Currently a Bicentenary Music Fellow, her research employs live classical music performance as a vehicle for digital innovation and inclusion, harnessing the power of AI and data science. It experiments with radical modes of storytelling and audience engagement as testing grounds for integrating multimodal information that underpins our emotional communication, and, in turn, investigates AI’s capacity to optimise this process, enabling new interactive paradigms and affective coordination among participants in a multimedia environment.

This enquiry extends the trajectory of her earlier practice-led projects, including Creative Digital Dynamics (chamber music concert series) and OperAI (opera innovation project with two premieres). Both projects explore AI's transformative potential to enhance accessibility & inclusion and facilitate audience interaction in classical and operatic music across cultural and socio-economic boundaries.

Alexandra is also the Creative Director of Operactive Arts, a UK-based social enterprise reimagining classical music and opera through immersive performance, talent incubation, audience interaction, and new business models. 

In the 2025/26 academic year, Alexandra delivers seminar teaching and chamber music coaching for master’s students on the MMus Composition (Electroacoustic Music and Interactive Media) and MMus Performance Studies programmes, and also serves as academic adviser to postgraduate music students. Courses taught:

• MUSC60221 Aesthetics and Analysis of Organised Sound (S1) (Course Instructor)
• MUSC60140 Recital (S1-2) (Academic Adviser and Ensemble Coach)

Tuesday: 10.00-12.00
Wednesday: 10.00-12.00

Please email me in advance before your visit.

I am an Associate Research Fellow at the Centre for Aesthetics and Business Creativity (ABC) at Lund University (Sweden). I am also a visiting fellow at Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) at UCL and a research associate at the Edinburgh Centre for Data, Culture and Society (CDCS).

In 2024-25, I held a Digital Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh. In 2023-24, I was a visiting research fellow at the School of Advanced Studies, University of London, and a stipendiary visiting research fellow at Digital Transformations and the Centre for Intermedial & Multimodal Studies at Linnaeus University (Sweden).