Francis Wong

Francis Wong is a longtime musician and community worker with roots in the Asian American Consciousness Movement. As a student and community activist in the 1970s and 1980s, he participated in struggles for ethnic studies, divestment in apartheid South Africa, and culturally responsive campus services, as well as in community campaigns such as Free Chol Soo Lee, Japanese American redress/reparations, Justice for Melvin Truss - a black youth killed by a San Jose policeman in 1985, immigrant worker rights, and Jesse Jackson for President.

As an extension of this organizing work, Wong embarked on an artistic career that has focused on community-building and social justice. For nearly four decades he has performed and recorded throughout North America, Asia, and Europe with such as musical luminaries as Jon Jang, Tatsu Aoki, Miya Masaoka, Vijay Iyer, Jen Shyu, William Roper, Bobby Bradford, James Newton, Don Moye, Glenn Horiuchi, Fred Anderson, John Tchicai, Cecil Taylor, Max Roach, and Joseph Jarman. He is also known for interdisciplinary work with collaborators such as poets Genny Lim and Juan Felipe Herrera, dancer/choreographer Lenora Lee, and taiko artist Melody Takata.

But his career as a musician is inextricable from his cultural activism throughout the United States, particularly the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Lancaster, PA. His artistic explorations are rooted in his work with communities as an artistic director, activist, music producer, and academic lecturer. A critical vehicle for his work is Asian Improv aRts, the organization he co-founded in 1987 with Jon Jang, which has been widely recognized for its role in creating a distinctive Asian American intersectional and interdisciplinary art space in the US.

Wong holds an MA in Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University, and has been teaching as Lecturer Faculty in the Department since 2017.