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 projects include the song-sharing project Sing Home which she leads as Artist-in-Residence at the Pao Arts Center in Boston’s Chinatown, and composing music for Conference of the Birds, an international multimedia collaboration with choreographer Wendy Jehlen's Anikaya Dance Theatre and dancers from 8 countries.

Previous projects include Sunbar, connecting Bostonians with sunlight, warmth, and each other during cold winter months, with the vision of a future mobile solarium; 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 Chinese water calligraphy sessions inviting public play and conversations about peace; 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); and Soldiers’ Tales Untold, a musical-narrative production mixing veterans’ stories, live music, and audience dialogue about war. In addition to violin, she also performs as a vocalist, erhu (Chinese violin) player, and even performed as an aerialist (aerial silks with Whistler in the Dark theatre company’s production of “Tales From Ovid”). 

Shaw Pong was a founding member of Play for Justice, a network of musicians and artists in Boston supporting social justice causes. Her 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, and 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 an Expressing Boston Public Art Fellow, an Artist-in-Residence at the Pao Arts Center in Boston Chinatown, a Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Fellow, and a Boston Celtics’ Hero Among Us.