Shaw Pong Liu

Violinist and composer Shaw Pong Liu engages diverse communities through multidisciplinary collaborations, creative music and social dialogue. Her project Code Listen, which she started as City of Boston Artist-in-Residence in 2016, used songwriting and performances to support healing and dialogue around violence, racism, and police practices, in collaboration with the Boston Police Department, teen artists, family members surviving homicide and local musicians.

Other previous projects include song-sharing project Sing Home in Boston’s Chinatown; What Artists Knead, a series of breadmaking parties across five neighborhoods in Boston for artists to bake bread and discuss their ideas for Boston's creative future; Water Graffiti for Peace, a series of outdoor public Chinese water calligraphy sessions inviting conversations about peace; and A Bird a Day, exploring birdsong, sunrises and composition (resulting in a site-specific composition for 18 solo string players in three tiers of balconies).

Shaw Pong's compositions have been commissioned by Silkroad Ensemble for the Freer-Sackler Museum, Anikaya Dance Theatre, A Far Cry, Lorelei Ensemble, and pianist Sarah Bob. As a violinist she performs with groups including Silk Road Ensemble, MIT’s Gamelan GalakTika, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Ludovico Ensemble, and Castle of Our Skins. She has worked as a teaching artist with Yo-Yo Ma's Youth Music Culture Guangzhou, the New England Conservatory of Music, the Urbano Project, Celebrity Series, Cantata Singers, Young Audiences Arts for Learning, and the Cuerdas Oaxaca strings chamber music festival in Mexico.

A graduate of U.C. Berkeley with a Masters in Violin Performance from the New England Conservatory of Music, Shaw Pong has been honored as a Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Fellow, an Expressing Boston Public Art Fellow,  and a Boston Celtics' Hero Among Us.