JinJin Xu is an inter-disciplinary artist and poet haunting the oceans between New York/ Shanghai/ Macau. Her docu-poetic practice interrogates mis/remembrance and self/erasure, bearing a poetics of witness to buried soundscapes, censored memories, and the geopolitical hauntings within our most intimate relationships. Documenting testimonies through linguistic and poetic interventions, JinJin spent years researching nüshu (women's script), a near-extinct language passed on by generations of women near her mother's hometown.
JinJin is the winner of the Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin Memorial Award and her work has received honors from the Paris Review/92Y Discovery Prize, Southern Humanities Review, Tupelo Press, the Cecil Hemley Prize (Poetry Society of America), Best New Poets, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Flaherty Seminars, Global Research Institute (Athens), Prague Indie Film Festival, Munich Autovision Film Award, Thomas J. Watson Foundation, and two Pushcart nominations.
Her installations, films, and performances have exhibited at Butter Room, Macau (2025); How Art Museum, Shanghai (2024); 14th Shanghai Biennial (2023); Sound Art Museum, Beijing (2023); Paris Design Week (2022); The Immigrant Artist Biennial, New York (2020); Harun Farocki Institute, Berlin (2018), and she has been invited to literary festivals in Taipei, New York, Macau, Qinghai, Massachusetts, Edinburgh, and more. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Robb Report, Harper's Bazaar Art, The Art Newspaper, and Art China.
JinJin received her BA from Amherst College and traveled for a year across nine countries as a Thomas J. Watson Fellow, recording docu-poems with women experiencing unusual forms of dislocation. She received her MFA in Poetry from NYU, where she was a Lillian Vernon fellow, and taught hybrid workshops through Tisch's Art of Future Imaginations Grant.
Her debut chapbook There Is Still Singing in the Afterlife was selected by Aria Aber for the inaugural Own Voices Chapbook Prize (Radix Media, 2020), and was named by the New York Times as a must-read when visiting Shanghai. Her second chapbook, This Is My Testimony, interrogates language, otherness, and belonging within academia (Black Warrior Review, 2022).
Named by Forbes China as 100 Most Influential Chinese in 2023, JinJin is currently the Moving Image Diversity Fellow at Bard College, New York.
