Professional skills Arranging, Programme notes, Research, Orchestration

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Biography

"I see myself as a translator of sound, image, and lived experience into music."

Junqi Wan is a composer and interdisciplinary artist whose work explores music as a site of translation—between cultures, media, and modes of listening. Based in New York, she works across contemporary concert music, electroacoustic and sonic arts, film, installation, and multimedia performance, often in close collaboration with artists, technologists, and researchers from other fields.

Her musical language is shaped by an early and sustained engagement with multiple instrumental traditions. Trained as a multi-instrumentalist in piano, guzheng, saxophone, dizi, and guqin, Junqi draws on both Western classical and traditional Chinese practices to construct layered sonic environments in which contrasting timbres, histories, and listening cultures coexist. Her work often dwells in friction, resonance, and transformation between distinct sound worlds.

Junqi’s artistic interests include graphic notation, zoomusicology (the study of animal sound), interactive media, and electroacoustic composition. She is particularly drawn to sound as a spatial, ecological, and embodied phenomenon, and to compositional processes that challenge anthropocentric listening. These concerns extend into her research-based practice, including science–art collaborations that translate environmental data and scientific inquiry into musical and audiovisual form.

Her work has been presented internationally across Asia, Europe, and North America, including at the New Media Art Exhibition (Shenzhen), VRHAM! Virtual Reality Festival (Hamburg), the 50th SEHSÜCHTE International Film Festival (Potsdam), the 2022 Jinan International Biennale, the First Shanghai International Digital Art Fair, Juilliard’s Future Stage Festival, the RCS PLUG New Music Festival, the Cascade Conducting Composers Workshop, and the 17th Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival. Her music has been performed by ensembles including RedNote and Hebrides.

In 2023, Junqi presented collaborative science–art research bridging sound, data, and environmental systems at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) General Assembly in Vienna. She has collaborated with visual artists, filmmakers, and technologists from China, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany, and continues to develop projects that situate music within broader cultural, scientific, and technological contexts.

Junqi is currently pursuing a Master of Music in Composition at The Juilliard School, studying with David Ludwig and Melinda Wagner. She will start her Doctor of Musical Arts at Juilliard in Fall 2026 as a C.V. Starr Fellow. She previously earned a Bachelor of Music in Composition from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

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Residence/Main Office New York

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Year of birth 2002

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Contact email