A citation accompanying Shih-Hui Chen’s 2007 Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters states: “Among the composers of Asian descent living in the U.S.A., Shih-Hui Chen is most successful in balancing the very refined spectral traditions of the East with the polyphonic practice of Western art-music. In a seamless narrative, her beautiful music, always highly inventive and expressive, is immediately as appealing as it is demanding and memorable.”
Born in Taiwan, Shih-Hui Chen has lived in the United States since 1982. In addition to garnering a Koussevitzky Music Foundation Commission, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Academy in Rome Prize, a Harvard/Radcliffe Institute fellowship, the Civitella Foundation fellowship, and The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency, her compositions have been performed widely throughout the U.S. and abroad. Chen’s compositions have brought her into contact with orchestras such as the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, and the National Taiwan Symphony Orchestra. Her recent projects include a thirty-minute multimedia cello concerto Our Son Is Not Coming Home To Dinner; a sixty-minute, mixed-media viola concerto, sisila ila ila: saying goodbye, which includes shadow puppets; and a cross-genre theatrical work, Kimchi, Pickles, and Wine.
Shih-Hui Chen serves on the Performing Arts and Culture committee at the Asia Society Texas Center and is a professor at the Shepherd School of Music, Rice University. She was the 2023 Walter Hinrichsen Prize winner from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and her music can be heard on Albany, New World, and Bridge Records.