Deborah WONG
Professor Emerita of Music at the University of California, Riverside, Ph.D. University of Michigan
Committed to public sector work at the national, state, and local levels, Deborah Wong focuses on Asian American music, performance, and community building. She serves on the board of Great Leap, a nonprofit arts organization in Los Angeles with a long history of community-based Asian American arts. In the past, she served on the boards for the Alliance for California Traditional Arts and the Smithsonian’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage.
She has written three books: Louder and Faster: Pain, Joy, and the Body Politic in Asian American Taiko (2019), Speak It Louder: Asian Americans Making Music (2004), and Sounding the Center: History and Aesthetics in Thai Buddhist Ritual (2001). She served as editor for Nobuko Miyamoto’s extraordinary memoir, Not Yo’ Butterfly: My Long Song of Relocation, Race, Love, and Revolution (2021). She is a former president of the Society for Ethnomusicology and a long-time co-editor of the Wesleyan University Press series Music/Culture. Her happiest hours of the week are spent going on air with her weekly radio show Gold Mountain for KUCR 88.3 FM in Riverside. In Riverside, she has worked on police accountability, the Save Our Chinatown Committee, and the Inlandia project Riverside Women Creating Change.