06/23/2026
Distinguished Legacy Awards
Anida Yoeu Ali (BFA ’96 Graphic Design)
https://faa.illinois.edu/alumni-friends/faa-legacy-awards/anida-yoeu-ali/
Anida Yoeu Ali is an interdisciplinary artist whose works span performance, installation, new media, public encounters, and political agitation. Raised in Chicago and born in Cambodia, she is a woman of mixed heritage with Malay, Cham, Khmer, and Thai ancestry. Utilizing an interdisciplinary approach to artmaking, her installation and performance works investigate the artistic, spiritual, and political collisions of a hybrid transnational identity.
Ali is the winner of the 2024 Arts Innovator Award and the 2014–2015 Sovereign Asian Art Prize for her series The Buddhist Bug, a multidisciplinary and internationally recognized work that investigates displacement and identity through humor, absurdity, and performance. Ali has performed and exhibited at the Haus der Kunst, Palais de Tokyo, Musée d'art Contemporain Lyon, Jogja National Museum, Malay Heritage Centre, Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, the Smithsonian, and the Seattle Asian Art Museum.
Her artistic works have been the recipient of grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, Ford Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Art Matters Foundation. Ali’s pioneering poetry work with the critically acclaimed performance group I Was Born With Two Tongues is archived with the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program.
Ali holds an MFA from School of the Art Institute Chicago (2010) and a BFA from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (1996). She currently serves as a senior Artist-in-Residence at the University of Washington Bothell where she teaches courses in Interdisciplinary Arts, Global Studies, and Performance. She spends her time traveling and making art between the Asia-Pacific region and the United States.
