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Alex Zhang

About

Using creativity to impact others around me.

Alex Zhang in a white shirt in front of a white colonnaded garden pavilion

Most of what I make starts with a feeling I want to hold onto, and a question of who else might feel it too.

I started painting seriously as a way through hard moments: starting high school online during the pandemic, seeing my grandmother only through a screen, losing my cat Xixi. Each piece became a record of that time and a way of finding resilience in it. My Scholastic portfolios grew out of the same idea, one built around resilience and one around harmony, and how something that feels personal is almost always connected to something larger.

Art also showed me what creativity can do for other people. At Visionary Arts I helped run booths where students sold their work for wildlife conservation, and led my classmates in painting a piano meant to be experienced through sight, touch and sound by children with disabilities. Watching strangers stop, play it, and connect with each other changed how I think about what making something is for.

That is what I try to carry into everything else. Illini Creative Impact gives student artists a place to belong, show their work and sell it. Museum Log helps people keep the art that stayed with them. I study Information Systems at Gies to learn how to build these things well, and how to reach more people with them.

Outside of that, I play piano, spend too long in museums, and still paint whenever I can.

Education

Education

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Gies College of Business

Information Systems & Operations Management

  • Deep Learning Specialization — Andrew Ng, Coursera (2025)
  • AI For Everyone — Andrew Ng, Coursera (2025)
Graduation
Expected December 2027
Languages
English, Mandarin

Experience

Experience

  1. Jun 2026 – Present

    Museum Log

    Founder, Product Designer & Developer

    Designed, built and launched an iOS app that identifies museum artworks from photos and keeps them in a personal collection.

    • Owned the product end to end: strategy, UX, React Native app, recognition pipeline, pricing and launch.
    • Grew a ~600-person waitlist and ran a ~40-person beta before the August 2026 launch.
    • Grew an Instagram audience of ~2,000 followers and ~750K views around the launch.

  2. Mar 2025 – Present

    Illini Creative Impact

    Founder & President

    Formerly Illini Art and Business Collective · Champaign, IL

    Founded a student organization at UIUC that connects creative work with business and community: exhibitions, art contests, and chances for student artists to sell their work.

    • Reached 50+ students in the launch semester through a website, Instagram, Discord and Quad Day.
    • Recruited an executive team with social media, tech and outreach sub-teams.
    • Ran “Earth Day Everyday,” a juried competition with partner campuses (~80 entries), ending in a May 2026 exhibition of 20+ artists at the Illini Union.
    • Built partnerships with other UIUC student organizations, including the Creative Collective.

  3. Sep 2025 – May 2026

    Illinois Founders

    Community Team Member

    Champaign, IL

    Creative communications, branding and promotion for the student entrepreneurship community at UIUC.

    To confirmAdd specific programs and outcomes from the résumé.

  4. May 2025 – Jun 2025

    Kaide Quartz

    Data & Information Systems Intern

    Beijing, China

    Built internal machine-learning tools for pricing raw materials, and supported the accounting team with compliance work.

    • Trained a gradient-boosting model to predict raw material unit prices on client orders, with a custom parser that extracts dimensions, weight and company from order data.
    • Built a Z-score tool that flags outlier pricing in raw materials spreadsheets.
    • Packaged both as Streamlit apps, including a retraining pipeline: employees upload an Excel file and click “Train Model.”
    • Organized and processed accounting vouchers for compliance.
    To confirmRésumé (Sep 2025) lists the title as “Data & Accounting Intern”. Confirm which title to use.

  5. Jun 2023 – Oct 2023

    Visionary Arts

    Team Leader

    Cupertino, CA

    Mentored younger artists, ran fair booths where students sold their work, and led a group public-art project.

    • Mentored 6 younger artists in acrylic painting and design.
    • Coordinated booths at 7 local fairs where students showed and sold art, with proceeds donated to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.
    • Raised $3,000 for children with disabilities by leading a banquet event with community leaders and local mayors.
    • Led classmates in creating “You and i in Harmony,” a multisensory painted piano exhibited in San Francisco.
A piano painted with a beach scene and a row of painted hands

Photo: Natalie Shrik for Drew Altizer Photography

2023 · Visionary Arts

You and i in Harmony

A painted piano I led a group of classmates to make at Visionary Arts. The piece combined artwork, braille and music into one multisensory object.

Shown at “You and i in Harmony,” Visionary Arts, San Francisco, October 2023.

Art

Recognition

To confirmWhich works won the Gold Key, Silver Key and Honorable Mentions, and in which years? Each work can then carry its award in the gallery.

Toolkit

Skills

Product

  • Product strategy
  • User research
  • UX design
  • Experimentation
  • Product analytics
  • Go-to-market

Engineering

  • TypeScript
  • React Native
  • Expo
  • Supabase
  • PostgreSQL
  • Python
  • Streamlit
  • Electron

AI & data

  • Machine learning (regression, tree-based models)
  • Anomaly detection
  • Computer vision
  • LLM integration

Creative

  • Oil & acrylic painting
  • Colored pencil
  • Figma
  • Procreate
  • Adobe Premiere Pro
  • Branding

Business

  • Entrepreneurship
  • Project management
  • Organizational leadership
  • Marketing
  • Community building
To confirmMark which skills are strongest so they don’t all read as equally advanced.

Elsewhere

Interests

  • Museums and art history
  • Representational painting — Sargent, Waterhouse
  • Piano — Certificate of Merit, Advanced level; Chopin and Rachmaninoff
  • Electric guitar
  • Consumer technology
  • Starting things
See the workGet in touch

Alex Zhang takes ideas from concept to market across product, technology, design and growth. Founder of Museum Log and Illini Creative Impact, and a Scholastic Gold Key–winning artist.