Cindy Lan

Artist Statement

My creative process is the sincerest personal expression I can share, manifested in the vessels of strings, voice, electronics, and movement/stillness. My growth as a composer is inextricable from my acceptance of the seemingly disparate parts of my life’s experiences and celebration of their coalescence in me. I’m a classically trained emo kid with the eavesdropping skills of a New Yorker, a born & raised Queens kid with a knack for picking up different cultures’ languages and rhythms. This becomes distilled through my daily practices, and flows into the music I create. My intention is to create sound worlds that people can relate to, and find both familiarity and newness therein. I do not consider mastery to be the final accomplishment; rather, I hope to continually share where I am, as Thich Nhat Hanh describes it, in adopting ‘interbeing’ in all aspects of my life.

Cindy Lan Solo Performance - May 2024 Photographer: Raphael Galvis

Bio

Cindy Lan is a violist, composer, and collaborative artist from Queens, NY. Since 2019, she has explored the combination of voice, strings, and electronics in her project ‘Breath & Bow Meditations’. Through these meditations, she seeks to understand facets of her emotional world as they manifest in looped strings, extended techniques, and their interplay with the human voice. She performed as a soloist with Orchestra Northern Arizona in 2021 and 2023. She is a 2023 recipient of the Queens Art Fund New Work grant for “Dots on Plates”, a viola concerto for string orchestra and percussion. Her string quartet, Ondine Quartet, is a 2024 Chamber Music America Ensemble Forward grantee. She performs with Isogram and is a contributing choreographer and performer for “Antonym: the opposite of nostalgia” by Sugar Vendil, and performed at National Sawdust, Lincoln Center, and Movement Research at Judson with Isogram. She is a pedagogue with over a decade of experience, and the Executive Director of the Greenwich Village Orchestra. Her band EMDR with guitarist Julia Monica writes songs based on themes of trauma, DV, and healing. She holds an MM in Viola Performance from the Eastman School of Music, and a Bachelor of Arts from Skidmore College.

cindylan.com