Violinist and composer Shaw Pong Liu engages diverse communities with creative music and social dialogue by innovating the audience experience of live music. Collaborating with artists from a wide range of disciplines, Shaw Pong creates genre-defying performances which interplay written and improvised music with narration, storytelling and movement. Her ongoing project, A Bird a Day, is a creative exploration of dawns, birds, and music. Recent projects include Ted Hughes' Tales From Ovid, a critically-acclaimed collaboration with Whistler in the Dark theatre company and ArtsEmerson, re-telling Greek myths with aerial silks and original music; Soldiers' Tales Untold, an original musical-narrative production mixing veterans’ stories, music, and audience dialogue about the long-term costs of war, and Translations, a site-specific, outdoor performance-installation, collaboratively created with choreographer Rodney Veal and twenty dancers, musicians, and "iBirds" ranging over a 40-acre park.
She is the founder of the 99% String Quartet and SQUEE (String Quartets Everywhere), bringing live chamber music to cafes, subways and other public spaces in Boston.
An avid explorer of new sounds, Shaw Pong has premiered new works with groups including Bang-On-A-Can All-Stars, MIT’s Gamelan GalakTika, and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, and received commissions for her own compositions from A Far Cry, Dialogue Chamber Music, and
the Urbano Project. She has held artist residencies at the Blue Sky Project and Acadia
National Park, and is a teaching artist with Urbano Project, Silk Road Connect, and Young Audiences.
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 and 2011 Artist-in-Residence and 2010 Program Director at the Blue Sky Project.
