violinist     teacher    director

Improvising violinist and sonic explorer Shaw Pong Liu creates genre-busting shows which interplay live music with narration and storytelling. Fascinated by the community-building potential of art, Shaw Pong seeks to share her work with diverse listeners.

Recent projects include “Soldiers’ Tales Untold”, a musical-narrative production that mixes veterans’ stories and music to engage audiences in dialogue about the long-term costs of war; “Jelly and Jelly Jam”, an imagined 1920’s encounter of jazz composer “Jelly Roll”  Morton, and the legendary Hungarian violinist Jelly d’Aranyi ; “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, 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.