Shihan Zhang is an artist and design futurist who builds speculative institutions for more-than-human worlds. Through interactive systems, embodied performances, objects, and collective rituals, she explores how bodies, emotions, and relationships might be reorganized when humans are no longer the only subjects of care, labor, and governance.

Working across art, design, performance, and emerging technologies, Zhang transforms possible futures into encounters that audiences can enter, perform, negotiate, and feel. Her practice uses institutional worldbuilding to reveal the values embedded in everyday systems and to imagine alternative forms of ecological and technological coexistence.

Zhang’s work has received international recognition from the Fast Company Innovation by Design Awards and World Changing Ideas Awards, Core77 Design Awards, ACM CHI, Falling Walls Science Summit, Lumen Prize, and International Design Excellence Awards. Her projects have been exhibited and presented at the Museum of Design Atlanta, Hyundai Motorstudio, Toronto Design Week, and Figma Conference, among others.

She is an Assistant Professor of Graphic and Experience Design at Virginia Tech, and founder of the creative studio alter+. Her cross-disciplinary experience includes NEW INC, SPACE10 at IKEA, AIGA, the Design Futures Initiative, the Institute for the Future, and Twitch.