KATIE LIU

viola

Katie Liu, a native of New Jersey, began playing the violin at age 5 and discovered her passion for the viola three years ago. She is currently pursuing a Master of Musical Arts degree at Yale School of Music and holds a Master of Music degree from the Colburn School. She also completed her undergraduate studies at Princeton University. Katie has studied with renowned teachers and has received accolades, including being a prizewinner of the National YoungArts Foundation. She has performed internationally and made her solo debut with the Princeton University Orchestra. She has also participated in prestigious viola competitions.

Born and raised in New Jersey, Katie Liu picked up the violin at age 5 and the viola three years ago on a whim, instantly falling in love with the instrument. She is a young musician of many talents: she is a Master of Musical Arts student at the Yale School of Music in the studio of Ettore Causa, she received her Master of Music degree at the Colburn School and she also received her undergraduate degree from Princeton University, concentrating in Operations Research and Financial Engineering with certificates in Computer Science and Musical Performance: her senior thesis was on the intersection of classical music pattern recognition, machine learning, and neural networks. 

In her early violin years, she studied with Duoming Ba of the New York Philharmonic, and studied with Masao Kawasaki at The Juilliard School Pre-College Division. During her Princeton years, she studied with Eric Wyrick on both violin and viola.

In 2015, she was a prizewinner of the National YoungArts Foundation, and in 2019 she traveled to Sweden on a concert tour to perform solo and chamber music with Per Tengstrand among others. She made her solo debut in 2019 with the Princeton University Orchestra, and was selected to compete in the Hindemith International Viola Competition (2021) and Tokyo International Viola Competition (2022).