SOPHIA SHEN

Born in Zhangzhou, a small city in southeast China, Sophia Shen is an award-winning composer, sound artist, pipa performer and improviser currently based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her music often bridges the divide between cultures and breaks boundaries between subjects. She incorporates pipa in many of her works, acoustically and electronically, as an artistic expression to facilitate cross-cultural and interdisciplinary dialogues. She has been invited to perform internationally at music festivals and programs such as SXSW, BBC Radio 3, ICMC (International Computer Music Conference), San Francisco Tape Music Festival, Edinburgh Festival Fringe, SF Performances PIVOT Festival, EcoSono Environmental Music and Sound Art Festival, SEAMUS (Society for Electro-Acoustic Music in the United States), Other Minds Festival and Third Practice Electroacoustic Music Festival. As a composer, she has been commissioned by many distinguished ensembles and organizations including the San Francisco Asian Art Museum, Headlands Center for the Arts, Wild Projects Production, William Winant Percussion Group, Thingamajigs and Gamelan Encinal. Her original pipa compositions have received both Silver and Bronze Awards of the Dunhuang Cup National Pipa Composition Competition in China.

She holds an MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media from Mills College where she also studied composition and improvisation. She received a BA degree in Music with High Distinction and a BA degree in German from the University of Virginia.