Shaw Pong Liu

Violinist and composer Shaw Pong Liu engages 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 storytelling and movement. 

 Recent projects include Water Graffiti for Peace, a series of outdoor Chinese water calligraphy sessions inviting public play and conversations about peace; A Bird a Day, exploring birdsong, sunrises and composition (culminating in a site-specific composition for 18 solo string players in three tiers of balconies); and Soldiers’ Tales Untold, a production mixing veterans’ stories, live music, and audience dialogue about war. In her musical storytelling pursuits she also performs as a vocalist, erhu (Chinese violin) player, and even an aerialist (aerial silks in Whistler in the Dark theatre company’s “Tales From Ovid”). 

 Shaw Pong is founder of the 99% String Quartet and SQUEE (String Quartets Everywhere), bringing live music to cafes, subways and other public spaces in Boston. An avid explorer of new sounds, her compositions have been commissioned by A Far Cry, Lorelei Ensemble, and Dialogue Chamber Music, and she has premiered new works with Bang-On-A-Can All-Stars, MIT’s Gamelan GalakTika, and Boston Modern Orchestra Project. She is a teaching artist for the Silk Road Project, Urbano Project, and Young Audiences of Massachusetts.