Lewis Center Fellows
yuniya edi kwon
Photo courtesy yuniya edi kwon
About
yuniya edi kwon (b. 1989) is a violinist, vocalist, and interdisciplinary artist based in Lenapehoking, or New York City. Her practice connects composition, improvisation, movement, and ceremony to explore transformation & transgression, ritual practice as a tool to queer ancestral lineage, and the use of mythology to connect, obscure, and reveal.
As a composer-performer and improviser, she is inspired by Korean folk timbres & inflections, textures & movement from natural environments, and American experimentalism as shaped by the AACM. Her work as a choreographer and movement artist embodies an expressive release and reclamation of colonialism’s spiritual imprints, connecting to both Japanese Butoh and a lineage of queer trans practitioners of Korean shamanic ritual.
She is a United States Artists Ford Fellow, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Robert Rauschenberg Awardee in Music/Sound, Van Lier Fellow & Resident Artist at Roulette Intermedium, Johnson Fellow at Americans for the Arts, Andrew W. Mellon Artist-in-Residence at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College, Hermitage Fellow, and a recipient of the National Performance Network Creation Fund Award. She was described as “absolutely stunning” in a feature in Wire Magazine, and was listed as one of the Washington Post’s “22 for '22: Composers and performers to watch this year.”
In addition to an evolving, interdisciplinary solo practice, she collaborates with artists of diverse disciplines, including The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Du Yun, Holland Andrews, Tomeka Reid, Kenneth Tam, Isabel Crespo Pardo, Lester St. Louis, Mariah Garnett, International Contemporary Ensemble, and as a member of the artist collective Juni One Set with Senga Nengudi and Degenerate Art Ensemble co-directors Haruko Crow Nishimura and Joshua Kohl.
As a violinist, violist, and/or vocalist, she has performed alongside Roscoe Mitchell, Moor Mother, Mary Halvorson, Nicole Mitchell, Cory Smythe, Susan Alcorn, Carla Kihlstedt, Jessika Kenney, and others. She has performed throughout the Americas and Europe, including the Kennedy Center, Big Ears Festival, Kaufman Center, Roulette Intermedium, SESC Pompeia, Barbican Centre, Jazzfest Berlin, Festival Sons d’hivers, Festival Banlieues Bleues, and more. Commissions include Bang On A Can, Roulette Intermedium, Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati, National Performance Network, and Colorado College Creativity & Innovation.
edi was born and raised in Minnesota, on the ancestral land of the Dakhóta and Anishinaabeg.
Courses
Videos
UMMA-YA (excerpts)
There is a pattern / slow
Improvisational Friendship Ceremony #9 with Lester St. Louis (cello)
Duo with Cory Smythe (piano)
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