JinJin Xu is a poet and artist based in Shanghai and New York.
JinJin's inter-disciplinary work is birthed from poetry, realizing itself in unheard soundscapes, unspoken memories, the taboos in our most intimate relationships, the secret language of women‘s script (nvshu 女书) — seeking to hear what lies beneath ordinary reality, reaching towards a poetics of witness through misremembrance and self-erasure.
Her installations, films, and performances have shown at the 14th Shanghai Biennial, the Harun Farocki Institute, Berlin, the Immigrant Artist Biennial, New York, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Most recently, her solo exhibition "Against This Earth, She Knocks" debuted at How Art Museum, Shanghai.
After attending Amherst College, she spent a year as a Thomas J. Watson Fellow recording docu-poems with women dislocated across nine countries. She received her MFA in Poetry from NYU, where she was a Lillian Vernon fellow. Her debut, There Is Still Singing in the Afterlife, won the Own Voices Chapbook Prize.
She was the 2020 winner of the Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin Memorial Award. In 2023, she was named one of the "100 Most Influential Chinese" by Forbes China.
JinJin is currently the Moving Image Diversity Fellow at Bard College, New York.