Sofia Jen Ouyang

Winner of the 2024 John Eaton Memorial Competition

SOFIA JEN OUYANG is committed to creating artwork that both expressively and critically engages with other people and the world. Sofia is the winner of two BMI Composer Awards (2023, 2024), the Columbia University Douglas Moore Prize 2023, the Juilliard Orchestra Competition 2023, the American Prize in Composition 2022, and the Juilliard Gena Raps Piano Chamber Music Prize 2022. She received an honorable mention from the New York Youth Symphony First Music Commission 2024, the Luigi Nono International Composition Prize 2023, and is one of eight composers selected to attend the Lucerne Festival Composer Seminar 2023. In addition, Sofia is a Fromm Foundation Fellow at Composer's Conference 2024, a recipient of the ARTZenter Emerging Composer Completion Grant (2024), a BluePrint composer fellow with National Sawdust (2021), a recipient of Columbia University’s Rapaport Fellowship (2021, 2022), and her works have been selected by Serbian Composer Association's 31st International Review of Composer and Society of Composers Inc. (2021). In 2025, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s will premiere a new work by Sofia as part of the DeGaetano Composition Institute.

Sofia’s works have been performed across the US, Europe, and Asia, including in venues such as Lincoln Center, Frankfurt Oper, Columbia University Miller Theatre, Luzern KKL, Arvo Pärt Center, The DiMenna Center for Classical Music, National Sawdust, New England Conservatory Jordan Hall, Curtis Institute of Music, Vienna School of Music and Performing Arts, Rockport Music Shalin Liu Performance Center, and in music festivals such as Lucerne Festival, Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival, New Music On The Point, APAC Choir Festival, ICEBERG, and Atlantic Music Festival. Her music has been played by Ensemble Modern, the Juilliard Orchestra, New York Virtuoso Singers, JACK Quartet, Trio Immersio, National Sawdust Ensemble, Isabel Gleicher, Hsin-Yun Huang, Wu Man, Brittany Hewitt, Jeffrey Zeigler, and Sae Hashimoto. She is also passionate about multidisciplinary projects, and her collaborators include theater director Zhou Ke, visual artist Sydney Lee, choreographers Connor Freeman and Katie Sponenburg, Columbia Ballet Collaborative, and filmmaker Rachel Suleymanov.

Sofia is the Music Director of Westside Chamber Players for the 2024-25 season. She is the Co-Artistic Director of the Columbia University Bach Society for the 2022-23 and 2023-24 seasons and has introduced contemporary music into the repertoire of this 70-member choir and orchestra ensemble by commissioning emerging composers. Sofia holds bachelor's degrees in Philosophy and Music from Columbia University and studied composition with Andrew Norman and Amy Beth Kirsten at The Juilliard School. In Fall 2024, Sofia will begin her doctoral studies in Composition at Columbia University.