Du Yun

Biography

Du Yun, born and raised in Shanghai, China, is a composer, performer, and performance artist, working at the intersection of orchestras, opera, chamber music, theatre, cabaret, oral tradition, public performance, sound installation, electronics, and noise. Her last major opera, Angel’s Bone, won a Pulitzer Prize for music in 2017; in 2018 she was named a Guggenheim Fellow; and in 2019 she was nominated for a Grammy Award. She was hailed by The New York Times as a groundbreaking artist and was listed by The Washington Post as one of the Top 35 female composers. Known as chameleonic in her protean artistic outputs, her music is championed by some of today’s finest international performing artists, ensembles, and organizations. As a curator and activist for new music and art, she was a founding member of the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) and artistic director of MATA Festival (2014-2018), and recently initiated the Pan-Asia Sounding Festival at National Sawdust. Du Yun was named one of the 38 Great Immigrants by the Carnegie Foundation in 2018.