About
Violinist, educator and community-builder Shaw Pong Liu (she/her) creates transformative listening spaces for dialogue and healing. From playing music in wintry bus shelters, to inviting people to share “songs from home” , to partnering with a midwife to create musical meditations on community-held birth, to creating participatory and meditative nature art-scapes, Shaw Pong seeks to connect people to one another through collaborative creative practices.
As City of Boston Artist-in-Residence in 2016 she created Code Listen, a five-year project collaborating with mothers who have lost children to homicide, Boston police officers, and teen artists to share stories and create original music together. Code Listen also filled concert halls, city streets, and Boston’s City Hall with musicians and memorial portraits of loved ones lost to homicide, raising community consciousness of the inequitable impacts of violence on the city.
A master musician and improviser on the violin, erhu, singing bowls, and voice, Shaw Pong is a composer of deeply personal, reflective, storytelling music. She performs, teaches and foments musical justice uprisings in the Greater Boston area. A mother of two young children, Shaw Pong is fired up about supporting families in their sacred journeys, working from 2023-2025 to help build Boston’s first Black-led birth center, the Neighborhood Birth Center, through creative arts-based community engagement. She performs with groups including the Silkroad Ensemble, Sonic Joy, and Soul Yatra Trio, and her compositions have been commissioned by Silkroad Ensemble, A Far Cry, Lorelei Ensemble, Anikaya Dance Theatre, Community MusicWorks, Hub New Music and the Celebrity Series of Boston. She holds a MM in Violin Performance from the New England Conservatory of Music. Liu is a 2018 Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Fellow, a 2020 Boston Celtics’ “Heroes Among Us” honoree.
artist reflection
I believe that musicians are magicians.
Is it not a feat of wonder, an act of magic, to experience a human being producing glorious sounds, melodies and rhythms from their body and their instrument?
The suspended sensation of awe and wonder that music conjures is powerful and connecting. It can transform a crowd of strangers into a single rapt body, sharing that magic.
In my work I iterate on a central inquiry: How can the deep listening which music cultivates offer a pathway to the transformative listening, healing and dialogue that our society needs?
It is a harrowing time to be an aware person on planet Earth. In the face of massive societal injustice and global catastrophe, I find hope in the interpersonal and intimate. I seek refuge in the power of music to transform spaces, connect people across differences, and create opportunities for dialogue.
Much of my work is collaborative, interdisciplinary, site-specific, and unfolds over multiple years. As an improviser I love to discover the possibilities of a group of people. I am most activated when facilitating the metamorphosis of a room full of strangers into an intentional community that is seeing and listening to one another.
An educator at heart, I am relentlessly optimistic about the potential each human being has to discover and express their most aware, compassionate, curious and creative self. I believe we humans need the embodied experience of community found when we sing together. I have witnessed - and thus believe in – individual and collective transformation.
As a mother of two young children, I am humbled and blessed by the consuming, exhausting, and miraculous journey of parenthood. I look at every parent before me with awe.
When my heart breaks, I think of the incredible humans in my community who have turned their pain into purpose: grieving moms, whose sons were killed, choosing to mentor men convicted of murder in order to stop cycles of violence. A mom whose child died at birth, creating safe communities for future grieving families so that others might not feel as alone as she did.
I cannot be lost in despair knowing such remarkable humans are in this world.
Let there be hope, let there be joy, and let us find each other through it.
All photos on this page by Stefanie Belnavis | The Diahann Project