Ming-Yuen S. Ma is an Associate Professor in Media Studies at Pitzer College in Claremont, CA, and a Los Angeles-based media artist.  He was born in Buffalo, New York, and was raised in Hong Kong. Ma was educated at Columbia University and California Institute of the Arts. His experimental videos and installations have shown national and internationally in venues ranging for the Museum of Modern Art in New York to the notorious Coral Sands Motel in Hollywood.  His single-channel videos include [os] (2007), Movements East—West (2003), Mother/Land (2000), Myth(s) of Creation (1997), Sniff (1997), Slanted Vision (1995), Toc Storee (1992), and Aura (1991). He was recently published in Vital - Live Art by Artists of Chinese Descent, edited by Sarah Champion, and will be included in two forthcoming books: Hong Kong Screenscapes, edited by Gina Marchetti and Tan See-Kam, (Hong Kong University Press) and Perform, Repeat, Record: A Critical Anthology of Live Art in History, edited by Adrian Heathfield and Amelia Jones (Routledge).  Ma is the co-editor (with Erika Suderburg) of the forthcoming anthology Resolution 3: Video Praxis in Global Spaces (University of Minnesota Press) and the co-editor (with Alexandra Juhasz) of the Moving Image Review for GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.

Ma's recent projects include the multimedia Xin Lu Project, which use personal and family history to explore the shifting identities of peoples in movement - as tourist, traveler, immigrant, refugee, exile.  The project encompasses four experimental videos, site-specific video bus tours, and other related installation and web-based components. In the summer of 2006, Ma conceived and organized the ReCut Project, a weekly live art series that presented eight contemporary interpretations of Yoko Ono's Cut Piece (1964).  The ReCut Project was a part of the exhibition Draw a Line and Follow It at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE). Other recent hybrid media projects include THIS IS NOT A FOREIGN FILM (2002) an 18-hour installation and performance, based on Pasolini's notorious film SALO, created for Platinum Oasis, an art/performance event curated by Ron Athey and Vaginal Davis, and held at the notorious Coral Sands Motel in Hollywood; Untitled: Video Self Portraits (2002), a collaboration between Ma and his students at Pitzer College with artists Amitis Motevalli and Dorit Cypis' Kulture Klub LA, created for the exhibition Democracy When!? Activist Strategizing in Los Angeles.  Ma has received grants from Art Matters, Inc., Brody Arts Fund, California Digital Arts Workshop, Durfee Foundation, Long Beach Museum of Art, WESTAF/NEA, and others.

Ma's work has been written about by critics and theorists including Glen Mimura, (Ghostlife of Third Cinema: Asian American Film and Video, 2009) Laura Marks, (The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses, 2000) Roger Garcia, (Out of the Shadows: Asians in American Cinema, 2001) Bérénice Reynaud, (Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices, 1996) Holly Willis, and Gina Marchetti.  Most recently, Asian American scholars Peter Feng and Xiaojing Zhou wrote about the Xin Lu Project for separate forthcoming publications.  Ma’s own recent publications include Untitled (Dear Ma Liuming), in X-TRA: Contemporary Art Quarterly (Winter 2006), Untitled (Dear Mr. Rocha) in Release Print (November 2005), A Conversation About Women, Gay Men, and AIDS, (with Richard Fung) in Corpus (Spring 2006).  He contributed an essay, The Voice of Blindness: On the Sound Tactics of Tran T. Kim-Trang's Blindness Series, for the book More Than Meets the Eye: Critical Essays on Tran T. Kim-Trang's Blindness Series (forthcoming).  He was also interviewed for the documentary Dragon Ladies and Kung-Fu Masters: Reconstructing Asian American Sexuality (sexTV), and the ACT UP Oral History Project.

As a curator and media activist, Ma recently co-directed (with Carol Stakenas) Resolution 3, an project on contemporary video that included a 3-day symposium, a traveling exhibition, and a book.  He has also directed the LA Freewaves Festival of Independent Video and New Media (1998), coordinated UCLA's Electric Shadows: A Pan-Asian Film Festival (1997), and the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival (1995/6).  As an independent curator, Ma has organized numerous media arts programs for venues including Artists' Television Access, MIX/NYC, CalArts, San Francisco Asian American Film Showcase, and Los Angeles Festival. He has served on grant panels for organizations including the Rockefeller Foundation, Creative Work Fund, Durfee Foundation, American Film Institute, Visual Communications' Armed with A Camera Fellowship, Los Angeles County Arts Commission and City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department.  Ma has served on the boards of directors for Foundation for Art Resources, Inc. (FAR) and Highways Performance Space.  He is currently a member of LACE’s Artist Advisory Board (LAB) and of the Steering Committee member for Fusion: Los Angeles LGBT People of Color Film Festival, presented by Outfest.