DR. ANNE HUANG Interview - 2025 Arts Seva Award Recipient
Dr. Anne Huang is a bridge builder and a visionary for traditional arts in the Bay Area and beyond. She draws from her background in Dentistry and immigrant experience growing up in Taiwan and then coming to the Bay Area. She has influenced the awareness of and support for traditional arts on a national scale.
She is the Executive Director of World Arts West, a 47-year-old arts organization that serves the largest world dance network in the US through artist services and collective advocacy. In 2019, she was appointed as the first person color and cultural artist to lead World Arts West. Under Dr. Huang’s leadership, World Arts West greatly expanded the accessibility and reach of the World Arts West Dance Festival, launched its first grantmaking initiative, and instituted pioneering programs such as the Arts Equity Research Project, and Grants Accelerator Program, an one-of-kind program that helps cultural artists access grants funding.
Q: You became the first person of color and cultural artist to lead World Arts West in its nearly five-decade history. How did that milestone shape your vision for the organization’s future?
Anne Huang: World Arts West was founded in 1978, so we’re 47 years old now. I was appointed in 2019 as Executive Director. By that time, the organization had already been around for four decades. Our constituency is over 85% BIPOC, so it really took four decades for the organization to hire a person of color to manage it. I’m also the first cultural artist to lead this organization, someone from our own community. Under my leadership, I transformed the World Arts West team, board, and staff to be majority people of color and majority cultural artists, reflecting the diversity of the constituency we serve. That had never happened before, and it’s transformed the organization significantly. We’ve evolved from being primarily a legacy festival producer to now having four program pillars that serve our communities holistically through performances, arts service programs, archiving and documentation, and advocacy work. Looking to the future, the biggest difference this has made, and will continue to make, is ensuring that our constituency’s voices, our cultural artists’ voices shape how the organization operates every single day. Whether it’s creating programs that address real-time needs, responding to political attacks on our communities, or confronting funding cuts, our advocacy and our priorities are centered around the voices and perspectives of our arts community.
Q: Before becoming Executive Director, you spent years advocating for culturally specific capacity building and resource equity in philanthropy. How have those experiences informed your approach to leading World Arts West?
Anne Huang: I’ve spent years deeply involved in culturally specific communities and have personally been part of the World Arts West community for about three decades. I saw how the organization started in the 1970s as a small grassroots network of cultural artists and grew into one of the largest, if not the largest, world dance networks in the country. Yet, despite this growth, the financial support for many of the 600 dance companies we support remains abysmal. To address this, I launched our Grants Accelerator Program, a year-long, rigorous training cohort for 12 Bay Area cultural artists each year to help them access grant funding. Since launching the program about four years ago, participants have raised close to $1.5 million for cultural artists. I also launched our Special Artist Commission Program to support large-scale commissioned works for cultural artists. Together, these programs have raised close to $2 million. So, one major lesson I’ve learned over the years is the persistent lack of financial support for cultural artists. These programs were created specifically to address that gap.
Q: You lead one of the largest world dance networks in the country. What have you learned from working with artists representing such a wide range of cultures, traditions, and histories?
Anne Huang: That’s a big question, but I’d say that while our community is large, diverse, and culturally specific, each culture being distinct, there are strong commonalities. Many of the cultural artists in our network engage in their practice as a form of political resistance and cultural preservation. Across countless traditions, artists are working to sustain practices that have been suppressed or attacked through colonial histories. We serve a large immigrant artist community, and many are working to preserve traditions that aren’t always supported by mainstream Western society while continuing to evolve them across generations. Culture is never static, and that’s something we emphasize under my leadership. Culture stays alive through evolution, music, dance, food, and language; all of it changes. Sometimes audiences expect cultural performances to reflect nostalgia, but that’s not how culture functions in real time. For example, Flamenco was once considered controversial because it integrated other influences, but now it’s a celebrated tradition. Another thing I’ve observed is the concept of diasporic culture. Artists across the African diaspora, for instance, whether from Haiti, Cuba, or Congo, often find solidarity and connection through shared cultural and artistic practices. In the U.S., we’re a country built on this diversity, full of first-generation immigrants and children of immigrants. I myself am part of the Chinese diaspora. Even among us, coming from different countries and traditions, we find connection and collaboration through shared cultural threads.
Q. Looking back on your time leading World Arts West so far, is there a particular moment or achievement that best captures why this work matters to you?
Anne Huang: There are so many, but one that stands out is March 2021, when our team became majority cultural artists and majority people of color, fully reflecting the community we serve. That was a major milestone. Much of my early tenure was spent addressing a six-figure debt. We became debt-free in December 2024, which was another huge milestone. Now, we’re stepping into an entirely new chapter: for the first time in our history, we’re becoming a funder ourselves. We received a $1.4 million grant from the Wallace Foundation to launch our own grantmaking initiatives. We also completed our first-ever research project, a two-year study funded by the Wallace Foundation. Between 2018 and 2024, I served on the DNC board, two of those years as Board Chair. That was very meaningful. And just this year, I joined the board of California for the Arts, the state’s largest arts advocacy organization. My leadership has been full of firsts, and all of those are really important in our advancement.
Q: What excites you most about the next generation of cultural artists and advocates emerging in the Bay Area and beyond?
Anne Huang: The next generation of cultural artists inspires me deeply. Many first-generation and older immigrant artists have focused on preserving their traditions as a way of protecting their identities in a new country. But this next generation feels different. They seem more outspoken, more confident in advocacy, and less afraid to express their culture proudly. When I came to this country in 1977, my parents encouraged assimilation to blend in, to be as “white” as possible through education, language, and lifestyle. My generation internalized that. But the younger generation doesn’t. They own their culture, on their own terms, not just what their families tell them it should be. For example, my daughter is half Algerian and half Taiwanese, and she defines her culture herself. My husband and I don’t dictate what that looks like. Social media has also completely changed the landscape. These young artists are part of a global community. They’re nimble, fast, and creative, whether it’s fundraising, cultural preservation, or advocacy. Their courage, their forthrightness, and their unapologetic ownership of culture truly inspire me.
Join us for the award ceremony at the November 8th performance of “Veil of Janki Bai” at ODC Theater at 8pm. Link to get your tickets.