violinist       teacher      director

Violinist Shaw Pong Liu is an innovator in the creation of genre-busting shows which interplay live music, narration, and storytelling. Recent projects include “Soldiers’ Tales Untold”, a production that mixes veterans’ stories, improvised music, and the music of Stravinsky to engage audiences in dialogue about the long-term costs of war; “Jelly and Jelly Jam”, a hypothetical encounter via musical time machine to 1925 of jazz composer “Jelly Roll”  Morton, and the legendary Hungarian violinist Jelly d’Aranyi (with Anthony Coleman as “Jelly Roll”); “Stone Soup”, a musical re-telling of the classic fable with an international cast at the Banff Centre;  and “From Folk to Funk”, a multicultural, multilingual exploration of folk-inspired music from five countries.

In the classical music world, recent performances include Bang-on-a-Can All-Stars, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, and performances with performances with Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Ensemble, in the world premieres of several new works.  A graduate of U.C. Berkeley with a Masters in Performance from the New England Conservatory of Music, Shaw Pong is the recipient of the Eisner Prize, the Hertz Travelling Fellowship, and was 2008 Artist-in-Residence at the Blue Sky Project in McHenry County, IL. 

As an improvising musician, composer and creative artist, Shaw Pong is fascinated by the communicative and community-building potential of art, and seeks to share these passions through her work as a performer and an educator.