DU YUN • 杜韵 • 杜韻

Composer. Performer. Advocator.

Photo: Zhen Qin | Makeup: Nina Carelli | Art Direction: SpaTheory

DYUN, born and raised in Shanghai, China, and currently based in New York City, works at the intersection of opera, orchestral, theatre, cabaret, musical, oral tradition, public performances, electronics, visual arts, and noise.  Her body of work is championed by some of today’s finest performing groups and organizations around the world.

Known for her “relentless originality and unflinching social conscience” (The New Yorker), Du Yun’s second opera, Angel’s Bone (libretto by Royce Vavrek), won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Music. She was nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best Classical Composition category for her work Air Glow. Her collaborative opera Sweet Land with Raven Chacon (for opera company The Industry) was the 2021 Best New Opera by the North America Critics Association. Four of her feature studio albums were named The New Yorker’s Notable Recordings of the Year, in 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021, respectively. Her latest monodrama opera In Our Daughter’s Eyes was a notable performance of the year in 2022 by the New Yorker. 

A community champion, Du Yun was a founding member of the International Contemporary Ensemble; served as the Artistic Director of MATA Festival (2014-2018); conceived the Pan Asia Sounding Festival (National Sawdust); and founded FutureTradition, a global initiative that illuminates the provenance lineages of folk art and uses these structures to build cross-regional collaborations from the ground up. Du Yun was named one of 38 Great Immigrants by the Carnegie Foundation (2018), “Artist of the Year” by the Beijing Music Festival (2019). In 2022, she was granted a Creative Capital Award for an AR inter-generational Kun-opera project. Asia Society Hong Kong has honored her for her continued contribution in the performing arts field. Other notable awards include Guggenheim, American Academy Berlin Prize, Fromm Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts. The Carnegie Foundation and the Vilcek Prize in Music have honored her as an immigrant who have made lasting contributions to the American society. In 2023 Harvard University honored her as centennial medalist, the highest recognition for its alumni.

As an avid performer and bandleader (Ok Miss), her onstage persona has been described by the New York Times as “an indie pop diva with an avant-garde edge.” 

Du Yun is Professor of Composition at the Peabody Institute, and Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. Her concert music is published worldwide by G.Schirmer.


(For all press: Du Yun prefers to be addressed as “Du Yun.” Wherein Du Yun cannot be used in its entirety, please note “Du” is the surname.)

DU YUN, born and raised in Shanghai, China and currently based in New York City, is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, performance artist, activist, and curator for new music, who works at the intersection of orchestral, opera, chamber music, theatre, cabaret, musical theater, oral tradition, public performances, sound installation, electronics, visual arts, and noise. 

Known for her “relentless originality and unflinching social conscience” (The New Yorker),  Du Yun’s second 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 in the Best Classical Composition category. She has been hailed by the New York Times as a groundbreaking artist, was listed by the Washington Post as one of their Top 35 female composers, and selected by Rolling Stone Italia in their decade review as one of the composers who defined the 2010’s. Known as chameleonic in her protean artistic outputs, Du Yun’s works are championed by some of today’s finest performing artists, ensembles, orchestras, museums, and organizations around the world. Her studio albums Sweet Land, A Cockroach’s Tarantella, Dinosaur Scar and Angel’s Bone were on The New Yorker’s list of “Notable Recordings of the Year” in 2021, 2020, 2018 and 2017, respectively. The double team work, a site-specific opera Sweet Land,with co-composer Raven Chacon, librettist Aja Couchois Duncan and Douglas, co-direction by Cannupa Hanska Luger and Yuval Sharon, was on the list of year end best performance list by the LA Times and The New Yorker, and won the Best New Opera in 2021 by the North America Critics Award Association.

At first glance, the one predictable thing about Du Yun, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer, performer, and multimedia artist, is her unpredictability. Dig deeper, though, and you can sense the conjoined strands of curiosity and compassion that run through everything she makes.

Steve Smith, The New Yorker

An avid performer, she has appeared in many assorted holes and halls, sites and museums. Her onstage persona has been described by the New York Times as “an indie pop diva with an avant-garde edge.” As a performance artist, engagements include the 2012 Guangzhou Art Triennial (Guangzhou Opera House, China),the 2018 Lahore Biennial (Pakistan), the National Academy Museum (USA), the inaugural Shanghai Project (China), and Contemporary Arts Center Córdoba (Spain). Her ongoing collaborations with Pakistani-American visual artist Shahzia Sikander have shown around the world, including the Popular Award at the Karachi Biennial, and are permanent collections at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi. Du Yun also leads her band Ok Miss, which exists as both rock band and chamber ensemble—from post-punk, metal,  to trip-hop, from electronica to improvisation—all while fostering all that exists in-between. 

Du Yun’s works…are elaborately theatrical, full of collaborations with visual and performance artists and bursting with virtuosic extended techniques. It makes sense that a musician so keen on multimedia approaches would identify a broad range of cultural influences on her style.

Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times
Photo by Matt Zugale for Miller Theatre.
Photo by Matt Zugale for Miller Theatre.

As a featured composer, selected commissions and venues: LA Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, Seattle Symphony, Carnegie Hall, London Southbank Centre, Kennedy Center, Whitney Museum, Baltimore Symphony, Festival d’Avignon, Ultima Norway, Salle Playel Paris, Darmstadt, Musica Nova Helsinki, Lincoln Center, RedCat, Kimmel Center, Cabrillo Festival, Detroit Symphony, American Composers Orchestra, Shanghai Symphony, Shanghai Opera Orchestra, Beijing Music Festival, Hong Kong New Vision Festival, Mann Center for the Performing Arts (Philadelphia), Trinity Wall Street, Beth Morrison Projects, Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ, Philharmonie Luxembourg, Salzburg Aspekte Festival, Lucerne Opera Theatre, the Bolshoi Orchestra (Bolshoi Theatre, Moscow), and BAM NextWave.

Du Yun’s  theatre credits include original music for Kung Fu (by David Henry Hwang); Dim Sum Warriors (by Yenyen Woo and Colin Goh), which in 2018 toured to 25 major cities in China. Recent theatre project with Tim Yip, Love in A Fallen City (by Eileen Chang), premiered in Oct 2021 in Shanghai and toured in China.

An alumna of Shanghai Conservatory of Music, Oberlin College (BM), and Harvard University (MA, PhD), Du Yun is currently Professor of Composition at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University and Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music.

As a curator and activist for new music and art, she was a founding member of the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE); served as the Artistic Director of MATA Festival (2014-2018); conceived the Pan Asia Sounding Festival (inaugurated at National Sawdust); and founded an ongoing multi-year FutureTradition Initiative in China where she works with folk musicians from around the world in order to champion more cross-regional collaborations. Recent curatorial engagements include the LA Phil Green Umbrella Series, Göteborg Art Sounds Festival , the centennial edition at the Donaueschingen Festival (Germany, Oct 2021),  and an article in OnCurating, edited by Rob Young. In 2018 Du Yun was named one of 38 Great Immigrants by the Carnegie Foundation, and in 2019 the Beijing Music Festival named her “Artist of the Year.” Asia Society Hong Kong Center has honored her for her continued contributions in the field of performing art. Other recent awards include the Foundation for the Contemporary Arts, the American Academy Berlin Prize and Creative Capital.

Du Yun’s staged and concert works are exclusively published by G. Schirmer. For scores, please contact G. Schirmer Promotion


(For all press: Du Yun prefers to be addressed as “Du Yun.” Wherein Du Yun cannot be used in its entirety, please note “Du” is the surname.)

杜韵

被《纽约时报》誉为当今活跃于世界舞台的新一代作曲家领军人物之一,杜韵为2017年美国普利策音乐奖得主, 成为其第一位荣获此奖的唯一亚裔女性。2018年获古根海姆大奖,并以作品《Air Glow》获得2019年第61届格莱美音乐奖最佳古典乐作曲家提名。此前,杜韵为小提琴家 Hilary Hahn创作作品为其赢得格莱美最佳室内乐专辑奖。个人专辑2017、 2018年连续登上《纽约客》年度十佳唱片、2019《纽约时报》年度最佳唱片、2019年北京国际音乐节年度艺术家、俄罗斯BraVo2019最佳古典音乐奖。并连续登上《意大利滚石杂志》和《英国古典音乐》十年回顾榜,被其列入2010时代艺术家榜单。

出生于上海,现常驻纽约,杜韵其人与她的音乐艺术一样,多面而复杂、立体而深刻:她具有多重身份是,一位活跃于世界各地的知名作曲家、表演艺术家、跨界艺术家及策展人;题材着眼于各类社会议题,包含深刻的情感与反思,并寻求与表演者及观众达到共鸣;叙述手法多元,触及魔幻现实主义等类型;音乐形态丰富多样,并擅长将多个艺术领域融合为一体包括歌剧、交响乐、音乐剧、戏剧、室内乐、艺术展览、现代舞蹈、口述文化、公共装置、即兴表演、声音艺术及电音;其音乐语言兼收并蓄,从古典到流行,文艺复兴风格的复调音乐、卡巴莱歌舞、现代主义,电子、后朋等风格融会贯通。

“为纽约繁华音乐市场增色的当代音乐家” —— 《纽约时报》

”思想深意的作曲家” —— 《金融时报》

“领军当代音乐前沿者” —— 《英国卫报》

“史上最佳35位女作曲家之一” —— 《华盛顿邮报》

“源源不绝的原创力量与坚定不移的入世良知” —— 《纽约客》

杜韵大胆而忠于自我艺术审美,在极简主义盛行的时代与时代审美背道而驰,以自己独特的额声音视角,奉行多样题材“杂食主义” 一般题材多样、表现形式丰富;及“极繁主义“将各精彩音乐元素语句层层叠加,挑战观众可辨之视听极限。

作为跨界艺术家,杜韵同时活跃于美术界,其多媒体艺术作品曾展于上海种子、上海外滩美术馆、广东美术三年展、阿联酋沙迦双年展、巴基斯坦 Lahore 双年展、新西兰奥克兰三年展、土耳其伊斯坦布尔双年展、西班牙科尔多瓦当代文化中心、美国国家艺术院及国家博物馆、罗马 Maxii 博物馆等世界顶级博物馆参展。多年来杜韵与巴基斯坦艺术家Shahzia Sikander合作作品得到西班牙Bilbao古根海姆博物馆、美国费城美术馆、阿联酋古根海姆博物馆永久收藏,2017年合作作品获卡拉奇双年展最佳人气作品奖。音乐厅作品主要委约团体包括洛杉矶爱乐、纽约爱乐、底特律爱乐、卡内基音乐厅、华盛顿肯尼迪艺术中心、伦敦南岸、丝绸之路乐团、挪威Ultima音乐节等, 作品广泛上演于世界一流演奏团体。

杜韵曾就读于上海音乐学院附小、附中及大学, 并获得美国奥伯林音乐学院学士, 哈佛大学硕士、 博士学位。先后师从邓尔博、陈钢、Randolph Coleman, Bernard Rands, Mario Davidovsky 等教授。 现为美国约翰霍普金斯大学的皮博迪音乐学院作曲教授,博士生导师。2017 年同时任聘上海音乐学院特邀教授。

身为策展人,杜韵曾任纽约深具影响二十年 MATA 艺术节的艺术总监,立志大力推广全球青年作 曲家的作品交 流和创作,开创并不断探索新媒介与新艺术的前沿。2018 年发起泛亚太跨 界音乐节,成功启动于纽约。2019 年她带领泛亚太跨界音乐节同时与伦敦南 岸与挪威 奥斯陆 Ultima 艺术节合作。 参与策划英国伦敦南岸文化中心 SoundState 艺术节、瑞典 GAS 艺术节、洛杉矶爱乐2020年室内乐策划、德国知名艺术节(Donaueschigen Festival)百年庆典 2022年等, 2020 年芬兰Music of Now策划导师、 2020年德国达姆斯特当代音乐节节导师。

秉信音乐无界,杜韵同时致力民俗音乐,她于2017年发起的《“未来传统”创想计划》广泛于世界各地的民俗音乐家、业余团体合作、实验 ,推广世界各民俗音乐致力世界传统文化的传播与再创作, 其中包括中国的地方戏曲。

音乐会作品由美国Schirmer出版社全球出版。


Photos available upon request.