About

Tian Li is a creative technologist, composer, lighting & sound designer and multimedia artist. He uses artistic practice to investigate creativity, particularly how artistic intentions develop through making, improvisation, and exchange. He builds sensing instruments and wearable interfaces that bring movement and muscular activity into sound and visual composition. His work with human–AI co-creation ranges from real-time audiovisual improvisation to exchanges between artists and personalized agents, asking how people can interpret, redirect, or refuse computational proposals as their ideas evolve.

Li composes electronic and electroacoustic music and creates live performances combining sound, visuals, lighting, and scent. His stage work includes performance planning, technical direction, and lighting and sound design. Across these settings, he approaches the design of an instrument, a responsive system, or a performance environment as a way to explore how people express ideas and respond to one another.

He has studied with Ted Moore and Lyn Goeringer at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University, and with Kelley Sheehan, Chris Mercer, and Stephan Moore at Northwestern University.

His educational work connects arts teaching with opportunities to make and present work. At Beijing Navigation School, he led an internship team, taught stage technology, and ran a workshop on performance publicity design. He founded the Stage Exploration & Innovation Program as a personal initiative to share stage knowledge and practical experience with students. Since November 2023, he has also independently taught and mentored more than twenty students, beginning with music education and later expanding into HCI and interactive arts.