Vivian Fung is a contemporary Canadian-American composer of orchestral, vocal, and chamber music known for her eclectic and idiosyncratic style. She is also a respected educator and has taught at the Juilliard School, Santa Clara University, and countless other establishments as a guest lecturer. Fung was born in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, in 1975, and she began playing the piano at four years old. She received composition lessons from Violet Archer, composed her first pieces when she was eight, and she also studied with Narcis Bonet in Paris. In 1992, she became a composition student at Juilliard, under the guidance of David Diamond and Robert Beaser. Additionally, she studied piano with György Sándor and Ernesto Lejano, and conducting with Miguel Harth-Bedoya. Fung finished her bachelor's degree in 1996, and she went on to complete her Master of Music in 1997. She continued her studies at Juilliard, and in the following year, her Scherzo for piano trio premiered at the California Music Teachers' Convention in Los Angeles. In 2002, she submitted her Three Love Songs in Chinese for soprano and orchestra for her doctoral thesis, and she joined the faculty of Juilliard as a lecturer. In the 2000s, Fung accepted artistic residencies in the U.S. and abroad, and she composed several works, including String Quartet No. 1, Six Haiku for baritone and piano, and Piano Concerto: Dreamscapes. She left her position at Juilliard in 2010, and pursued her interests in Balinese gamelan and Chinese folk music. She traveled to Bali in 2010 and competed in the Bali Arts Festival as a member of the Gamelan Dharma Swara ensemble. Fung composed Yunan Folk Songs in 2011, and in 2012 she traveled to Southwest China to continue her study of Indigenous Chinese culture and folk music. She won the 2013 Juno Award for Classical Composition of the Year for her Violin Concerto, which was recorded on the album Vivian Fung: Dreamscapes. Fung became a member of the Music Composition Faculty of Santa Clara University in 2017, and she taught summer sessions at Banff Center for the Arts, where she composed The Ice Is Talking for percussion and electronics. She served as composer in residence at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in 2018, and in 2019 she traveled to Cambodia for research on her operatic work Two Opera Scenes: Grover and Friends/Alarm, from 2021. Her Birdsong for violin and piano was featured on the album Jin Yin in 2020, and she returned to Cambodia in 2023 for further research on the Cambodian genocide. The Jasper String Quartet recorded all four of Fung's string quartets on the 2023 release Insects & Machines: Quartets of Vivian Fung. She continues to be very active as a composer and educator, and she resides in California with her husband, Charles Boudreau. ~ RJ Lambert, Rovi