Shaw Pong Liu, violin
Musician and community-builder Shaw Pong Liu (she/her) facilitates dialogue and healing through listening-based creative collaborations. From playing music in wintry bus shelters, to inviting people to share their “songs from home” and migration stories, to creating sidewalk Chinese calligraphy play spaces, Shaw Pong seeks to connect people to one another through embodied creative practices. As City of Boston Artist-in-Residence in 2016 she created Code Listen, a five-year project collaborating with mothers who’ve lost children to homicide, Boston police officers, and teen artists to share stories and create original music together. Code Listen also filled concert halls, city streets, and Boston’s City Hall with musicians and memorial portraits of loved ones lost to homicide, raising community consciousness of the inequitable impacts of violence on our city. Shaw Pong is a violinist, erhu player, and composer who performs, teaches and foments musical justice uprisings in the Greater Boston area. She performs with groups including the Silkroad Ensemble, Sonic Joy, and Soul Yatra Trio, and her compositions have been commissioned by Silkroad Ensemble, A Far Cry, Lorelei Ensemble, Anikaya Dance Theatre, Community MusicWorks, Hub New Music and the Celebrity Series of Boston. Liu is a 2018 Kennedy Center Citizen Artist Fellow, and a 2020 Boston Celtics’ “Heroes Among Us” honoree.
https://www.shawpong.com/
shawpong@semiosisquartet.com
Photo Credit: Robert Torres photography