What happens when an artist sees policy as an art of empathy, and the stage as a platform for raising voice? For Sue Zhao, a high school student whose multidimensional work blends music, drama, literature, and activism, the answer is a curious reimagination of what community impact can look like in the 21st century.
From writing a prize-winning drama about Alzheimer’s and AI to composing contemporary music that explores themes of anxiety, identity, and belonging, Zhao uses every tool in her creative arsenal to spark dialogue on some of today’s most pressing ethical and cultural questions. But ask her whether she’s an artist, writer, or activist first, and she’ll pause. “Those labels can be limiting,” she says. “I’m just someone trying to create connection as a member of my community, and bring visibility to the issues we are not aware of.”
Zhao is not interested in accolades for their own sake, though she’s earned her fair share, including from an honorary mention in Scholastic to music performances at her school’s stage, and then community roles with the UNDP Movers program – but what matters to her is how each project contributes to a larger mission: understanding the ties that bind us as a society.
Art as Advocacy
Take her original drama script, for example. A haunting story shaped by themes of grief, memory, and artificial intelligence, it follows a girl caring for her father with Alzheimer’s, whose close friend urges her to consider purchasing an AI replica of him for when he eventually passes. But in a tragic turn, the girl dies unexpectedly before her father, prompting the friend to replace her with an AI version instead. Inspired by Allison Pugh’s The Last Human Job and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, the piece culminates in an ambiguous embrace between the AI and the father, but reflecting that technology can never replicate human empathy.
“I wanted to both warn about AI’s dangers and explore what it means to be human,” Zhao explains. Her approach isn’t purely conceptual. Her commitment to advocacy is grounded in hands-on work; whether participating in Juntos, a weekly English-learning program for newly arrived immigrants, or serving as co-president of the Asian Student Coalition, where she helped organize the Asian American Footsteps Conference and launched Tabor’s AAPI Awareness Weekend. From accessible compositions like Take Me Home to campus-wide anti-racism initiatives, Zhao’s work fuses creativity with community impact.
Theory Meets Theater
While Zhao’s musical work connects through sound, her academic writing draws from political philosophy and sociology. In one essay, she compares the Qing and Roman empires through the lens of “efficiency vs. robustness,” analyzing why civilizations collapse, and what lessons modern societies might learn. Whether she’s composing music or citing Locke, her work reflects an intellectual restlessness and ethical clarity that defies easy categorization.
For Zhao, performance isn’t separate from scholarship, it’s another way of engaging with it. This interplay of art and inquiry extends to her research on Tibetan ethnomusicology, where she applies Michel Foucault’s theories of discourse and power to analyze how performance becomes a site of resistance and identity. Through studying various musical genres by Tibetan interlocutors, she explores how art is used as an expression of human rights, cultural continuity, and political struggle in the modern world.
This same philosophy came to life again in her school’s production of She Kills Monsters, a play about grief, queerness, and fantasy gaming. Zhao saw it not just as a dramatic piece but as a vehicle to bring visibility to LGBTQ+ stories.
Embracing the Eccentric
Being interdisciplinary hasn’t always meant being understood. Sue admits there have been times when the work she has created or engaged in is not widely embraced as other more popular art approaches. But she’s unfazed. This sense of agency, of seeing difference as strength, is perhaps what makes Zhao’s vision so compelling. It also informs her ambitions for the future. Though she’s still exploring whether her path lies in law, policy, or the nonprofit sector, Zhao is certain of one thing: she’ll lead with empathy.
She believes that the arts have taught her to see people, and not just problems, she wishes to enter spaces not with solutions pre-written, but with a willingness to listen and collaborate. As a member of her school’s Community Life Committee, she reviews disciplinary cases and helps shape school policies. The work, she says, echoes the same issues she explores in her art: individual vs. community, justice vs. mercy.
Reimagining What Comes Next
This summer, Zhao will attend the Telluride Association Summer Seminar (TASS) on anti-oppressive studies, a space she hopes will provide clarity on how to best merge her passions for art, policy, and community building.
In a world increasingly driven by metrics, output, and algorithms, Sue Zhao reminds us of the power of story, the importance of empathy, and the quiet revolution that can happen when we embrace the eccentric, the interdisciplinary, and the human.
