Miya Masaoka

Miya Masaoka is a musician, composer, performance artist, teacher, and sound artist living and working in New York City. Her work operates at the intersection of sound, composition, improvisation, spatialized perception, and social interaction. Currently, she is director of the MFA sound art program at Columbia University. Over the past two decades, Masaoka has created a body of work encompassing not only notated composition and hybrid acoustic-electronic performance on Japanese traditional string instruments such as the koto and ichigenkin, but also instrument building, wearable computing, and sonifying the behavior of plants, brain activity, and insect movement. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at institutions and organizations such as La Biennale di Venezia, Park Avenue Armory, the Kunstmuseum Bonn, the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia (ICA), the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA), and the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art, among others. A Fulbright scholar, she is the recipient of a Doris Duke Artist Award, a Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Special Award in the Arts, the Montalvo Arts Center’s Lucas Artists Residency, and others. She has taught composition at New York University and at the music/sound program at the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College. In 2018, she will debut her sound installation and lecture at MoMA PS1, as well as a piece with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. In 2018, she served as a Center Pew Fellowships panelist.