Maya Nguyen: huh ugh uh hm mhm
In September 2025, Jack Straw and Arts and Visually Impaired Audiences (AVIA) presented an accessible youth and family art workshop with resident artist Maya Nguyen, in conjunction with her New Media Gallery installation huh ugh uh hm mhm.
After an audio described tour of the installation, participants worked with Jack Straw engineers Daniel Guenther and Ayesha Ubayatilaka and teaching artists Laura Ferri and Iveliz Martel to record improvised nonverbal conversations, recreating Maya’s process of recording the sounds heard in her installation. The workshop concluded with participants exploring the New Media Gallery with recordings of their own voices integrated into the installation.
Listen: huh ugh uh hm mhm workshop soundscape
This program was made possible with support from the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, 4Culture, Washington State Arts Commission, National Endowment for the Arts, and individual contributors.
Artists
Maya Nguyen
Maya Nguyen is a Vietnamese-Russian interdisciplinary artist with a focus on sound performance and diasporic making. She gathers speech fragments, urban recordings, body movements, migratory routes, sounds imitating nature…
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Laura Ferri
Laura Ferri is a freelance performing artist whose work as an actor, playwright, and director has been seen in theaters across the country. She has worked extensively with the blind…
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Iveliz Martel
Iveliz is an actor, teaching artist, and journalist from Chile. She holds an MFA in Acting from the University of Washington School of Drama and an MS in Science Journalism…
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