Dr Alexandra Huang-Kokina

overview

Dr Alexandra Huang-Kokina is a Bicentenary Fellow in Music at the University of Manchester, pianist and creative director whose work bridges music, literature, intermediality, and digital creativity. As a maker of immersive opera and performer/curator of experimental music ensembles, her practice directly informs her research at the intersection of performing arts, digital innovation, and intercultural inclusivity. Her current work employs opera as case study and engine for collaborative creativity, harnessing AI and data science to expand participatory and artistic possibilities. Through radical innovations in storytelling and audience engagement, she has designed, written, and directed two experimental operas Yūrei (2025) and The Covenant (2026), infused with Japanese Noh and Kabuki theatre, improvisation and gamification. Her vision is to reimagine the future of opera, making it more accessible, engaging, and sustainable for diverse audiences. She is also the Artistic Director of Operactive Arts, a UK-based cultural enterprise reimagining classical music for the modern world.

Academic Career: Alexandra is a Bicentenary Fellow in Music at the University of Manchester, and an Associate Fellow at the Centre for Aesthetics and Business Creativity at Lund University (Sweden). She’s 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. In 2024-25, she held a Digital Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. She was formerly a visiting research fellow at the University of London. She holds a PhD from the University of Edinburgh (2023), where she explored the dynamic relationship between piano playing and novel writing.

Her scholarship has been published by Routledge, Cambridge University Press, Peter Lang, among others, with a forthcoming monograph under contract with Palgrave Macmillan. Her current research interests include digitally-mediated opera, collaborative and AI-augmented creativity, and audience engagement in the performing arts. Past interests include the intellectual history of Western art music, and performance studies more broadly.

Music Journey: Alexandra’s musical life has been a vibrant fusion of artistic disciplines and digital experimentation, bridging diverse cultural traditions with new media practices. Her work in digital creativity breathes new life into her performance practice, exemplified by the ‘Creative Digital Dynamics‘ chamber concert series and the immersive opera project (‘OperAI‘). These initiatives aim to create playful, inclusive experience and steer opera and classical music towards today’s digital entertainment cultures.

Arts management: Alongside her academic and musical career, Alexandra is passionate about talent incubation. This led her to co-found Operactive Arts (with Arturs Kokins) in 2024—an arts management company that reimagines both the artistic and business sides of classical music and opera. Operactive Arts commissions new music, produces experimental opera, and collaborates with some of the best emerging talents in music and creative technology in the U.K. and internationally.

My Book: Alexandra’s forthcoming academic book, The Musical Performativity of Twentieth-Century Piano Novels, is under contract with Palgrave Macmillan. This book delves into a global corpus of narrative fiction focused on piano performance in non-conventional settings. It argues that these piano stories transcend mere aesthetic subjects, serving instead as discursive vehicles for socio-political transgression that address class mobility, intercultural conflicts, and interracial politics.

My Education: Alexandra’s journey began with a first degree at National Taiwan University, where she read English, Japanese, and French languages and literatures. She went on to complete her first master’s in modern literature at the University of Edinburgh, where she stayed for her PhD (2019-23). During the PhD, she also successfully auditioned for and pursued her second master’s degree in piano performance at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (2020). In May 2023, she passed her PhD viva with only minor editorial corrections. She remains deeply grateful for the generous scholarships and sponsorships (totalling over £100,000) that supported her academic and artistic path.