Photograph © Ellen Crane

Composer and violinist Justine F. Chen is currently pursuing a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in music composition at The Juilliard School. A native of Brooklyn, New York, she received her training in violin and music composition at The Juilliard School and in dance at the School of American Ballet. Ms. Chen was the first student in the history of Juilliard’s College Division to pursue a double-major in violin and music composition. She has conducted extensive scholarly research and lectured on such subjects as Igor Stravinsky, the late Beethoven quartets, Mario Davidovsky’s Synchronisms series, and electronic music. Ms. Chen has been the recipient of multiple awards, commissions, and grants, including the ASCAP Grants for Young Composers and the BMI Awards for Student Composers. As a violinist, Ms. Chen has performed extensively around the world and specializes in the performance and interpretation of contemporary music, particularly that which employs computers and electronics. Since 1999, she has been studying the intricacies of the interactive computer music program MAX/MSP.

Ms. Chen has worked in collaboration with choreographers and animation, film, and theater directors. She has written incidental music for numerous theatrical productions, including Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and James Glossman’s award-winning adaptation of Jim Lehrer’s novel The Special Prisoner at The Playwright’s Theater in New Jersey. In 2001, Ms. Chen collaborated with digital artist Ye Won Cho, scoring a short animation film, Trilemma, which was broadcast on PBS’ “Reel New York” in June 2002 and selected for screening at such prestigious festivals as the Hiroshima Animation Festival, the New York Expo, the Student Academy Awards, and Anima Mundi in South America. Her computer-enhanced chamber opera for The Juilliard School, premiered in December 2004. Ms. Chen, in collaboration with writer Gabriel Leif Bellman, is also writing the opera’s libretto.

Her collaborations with choreographers include Perpetual Flux, with David Parsons, which premiered at Alice Tully Hall in 1998 as a part of Juilliard’s Choreographers and Composers series; Katarzyna Skarpetowska, also with David Parsons, which was performed during Juilliard’s 1998 Summer Dance Tour of New York City Schools, and Of Roots and Stones, with Alvin Ailey’s Iyun Harrison, which was performed as part of the 2000 Juilliard Spring Dance Concert by the School’s Dance Ensemble and Orchestra. The New York Times wrote of this piece, “Justine Fang Chen, a Juilliard student composer, blended popular dance rhythms into the kind of propulsive, emotionally resonant score that choreographers tend to dream of.”

In the summer of 2000, Ms. Chen held the Robert and Lilian Turchin Chair as Composer-in-Residence at the Appalachian Summer Festival in Boone, North Carolina, where she collaborated with choreographer Adam Hougland to create the chamber work Stand Nine. She has worked on a piece for drum set and piano, a composition for a dance project with AMDaT, and her second collaboration with Mr. Hougland for the New York Choreographic Institute 2004 Spring Session.