Hao Huang (pianist)

In 2019, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation's Truth, Racial Healing & Transformation (TRHT) program awarded funds to Huang to originate and lead a multimedia performance event in Pico House about the LA Chinatown Massacre, one of the worst race lynchings that ever took place on the West Coast. In 2021, in partnership with the UCLA Asian American Studies Center, Huang was presented with the UCLA Chancellor’s Arts’ Initiative Award as executive coordinator of the “Chinatown Elegy” transarts/educational event that commemorated the 150th anniversary of the 1871 LA Chinatown Massacre at El Pueblo de Los Ángeles Historical Monument. It was attended by US Representative Judy Chu, UCLA Chancellor Gene D. Block, LA city councilman Kevin de León and others. In early 2022, under the aegis of Scripps College, Huang was the principal impresario of a three-part interarts performance event, American Dreams – Asian Nightmares[National Endowment for the Arts]] (NEA) Grants for Arts Project, Music Division. This work by NEA commissioned composer Micah Huang explored the rich and often bittersweet history of Asian Americans in California. In Spring 2022, as a playwright and poet, Hao Huang was one of three authors selected for a 2022 California Writing Residency at Yefe Nof near Lake Arrowhead, California; later in summer 2022, he was an artist-in-residence as a composer at La Macina di San Cresci in Greve in Chianti, Italy.

In 1998, Huang was selected as a participant in the National Endowment of the Humanities Summer Seminar, “National Identity in China: the New Politics of Culture”, East-West Center, University of Hawaii at Manoa, he was invited in 2005 to participate in the Mellon Foundation Inter-Institutional Travel Grant "Monuments and Landscapes" project in Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, PRC (Vassar, Middlebury, Denison and Scripps Colleges)., Huang was chosen to be a 2008 Fulbright Scholar in American Studies at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary. He was selected as an American Council on Education Fellow in 2012, sponsored by the ACE Council of Fellows Fund for the Future and served as a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Scholar for the last international NEH seminar "Arts, Architecture and Devotional Interaction in England, 1200–1600", York UK in 2014.

Huang was interviewed for the 1997 Washington Post article, "Perfecting Practice". In 2002, he was featured on NPR's Morning Edition about "The 'Lost' Opera of James P. Johnson and Langston Hughes". The Wilson Quarterly reviewed his article on "Why Chinese Play Western Classical Music" in Spring 2012. In 2021, Huang was initiator and narrator of the nationally acclaimed podcast (authored and produced by Micah Huang) about the 1871 LA Chinatown massacre, "Blood on Gold Mountain," that reached #23 in the USA in the history category of Apple Podcasts. The podcast was covered by National Public Radio, KPBS Public Media, the Washington Post, Spectrum News 1, the digital media outlet NowThis News and others. In fall 2022, his podcast play, "坚持 Jianchi/Perseverance," registered over half a million hits on Baidu in the PRC.

Huang's essay "The Parable of the Grasshoppers" was honored as American Music Teacher's 1995 Article of the Year by the Music Teachers National Association. Other scholarly articles have been published in refereed journals in Hungary, Russia, UK, Greece, Japan, the PRC and the USA, of which the most frequently cited are “Why Chinese people play Western classical music: Transcultural roots of music philosophy” in International Journal of Music Education 30(2), 2012; “Yaogun Yinyue: rethinking mainland Chinese rock ‘n’roll” in Popular music 20(1), 2001; book chapter “The Oekuu Shadeh of Ohkay Owingeh” in Voices from Four Directions: Contemporary Translations of the Native Literatures of North America, U of Nebraska Press 2004; “Billie Holiday and tempo rubato: Understanding rhythmic expressivity”, co-author RV Huang, in Annual Review of Jazz Studies 7, 1994; “Speaking with spirits: The Hmong Ntoo Xeeb new year ceremony”, co-author B Sumrongthong, in Asian folklore studies, 2004.