The 2026 Jury Members
Lynn Nandar Htoo is a sound designer and music producer based in Yangon, Myanmar. Lynn excels in seamlessly integrating traditional Southeast Asian musical elements with modern technology, evident in her work across filmmaking and electronic music production. Lynn’s contributions are marked by a deep exploration of Southeast Asian tuning systems, advocating for the preservation of cultural heritage through contemporary expression.
Notably, Lynn was selected for Southeast Asia’s music research development program by Nusasonic and played a pivotal role in the “Listening to the World – 100 Years of Radio” initiative, supported by the Goethe Institute and Bauhaus University. Her projects have garnered international recognition, reflecting a harmonious fusion of tradition and innovation.
Rani Jambak is a composer, producer and vocalist based in Medan, North Sumatra (Indonesia). She began her performance career by working on the Goethe Institute’s Sound of X project and launching Medan Soundspectives, a festival celebrating the acoustic diversity of her home city. Rani is a dedicated environmentalist who produces music to raise awareness on environmental issues through a music-ecological campaign entitled #FORMYNATURE. Her new project #FUTUREANCESTOR is inspired by her Minangkabau ethnic identity and uses sound to explore connections between traditional knowledge and nature. For her purposes, she built a unique invented instrument called the “Kincia Aia”, inspired by the traditional west Sumatran water wheels. Rani is a PhD researcher of the Netherlands Research Organization’s research project: Restituting, Reconnecting, Reimagining Sound Heritage (Re:Sound).
Cường Minh Bá Phạm is a practitioner and researcher working at the intersection of sound, community, and archives. He hosts a monthly NTS show under the handle ‘Phambinho,’ where he and occasional guests attempt to musically reframe ‘Asia’ as a contested paradigm. In addition, he has developed long-form projects for festivals and institutions across Europe and Asia. He is also the co-founder of An Việt Archives, which oversees the largest known collection of documents, photos, and other objects related to the British-Vietnamese experience, currently housed at Hackney Archives.
Cường is a UKRI-funded PhD researcher at the University of Birmingham, as part of the larger SoundDecisions project. His research explores sound archives as sites of co-creation, co-discovery, and interaction for diasporic groups who imagine the Mekong Delta as home.
Napakadol Kittisenee is a doctoral candidate in history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a doctoral fellow at the Leibniz Institute of European History. His research interests include history and anthropology of Buddhism, Buddhist and Daoist liturgy, sonic power, borderlands, migration, diaspora, decolonization, and the predicament of spirituality in the disruptive era. He interned for UW-Madison’s The Nonviolence Project and worked for the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) Radio Archives of the UW library. He also served as a national lead (Thailand team) of the digital archive project, “Living with COVID-19 in Southeast Asia: Personal and Visual Experiences of Crisis, Control, and Community,” by the National University of Singapore.