Polish of Vietnamese descent composer and pianist, Ania Vu (née Vũ Đặng Minh Anh) writes music that explores the interplay between the sound properties of the words and their meanings, musical energy related to form, and varied notions of time. She also enjoys crafting her own text that serves as a sonic, formal, and expressive guiding reference in her musical writing process.
Her most recent commission and premiere of "small tenderness" at Tanglewood's Festival of Contemporary Music was described by the Boston Globe as an exhibition of "artful vocal writing [that] ranges from percussive whispers to glinting, pure-voiced lines that [...] blended elegantly into the roiling cauldron of strings." Ania has received recognition and fellowships from ASCAP, the American Opera Project, Copland House, Tanglewood, the Boston New Music Initiative, and the I-Park Foundation, and has been privileged to have worked with the New Fromm players, the Grossman Ensemble, DanceWorks Chicago, the Mannes American Composers Ensemble (MACE), the Daedalus and Mivos string quartets, Sō Percussion, the TAK Ensemble, and the International Contemporary Emsemble, among others.
Ania was the 2022-23 Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Chicago's Center for Contemporary Composition and a 2021-23 composer fellow with the Composers & the Voice, a two-year training program that provides experience writing for the voice and opera stage. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and her B.M. in composition and theory from the Eastman School of Music. In the fall of 2023, Ania serves as Lecturer in Music Composition at the University of Texas at Austin's Butler School of Music.
Together with pianist Eunmi Ko, they started an initiative called The Music She Writes, a series of four virtual concerts featuring 25 works by Asian female composers. This project aims to highlight the diversity and significance of music by a very large, yet underrepresented community.
Ania is also an actively performing pianist and a passionate music educator. For more information about her piano background, performances and teaching, please scroll down to Piano.
Outside of music, Ania has a deep interest in languages, and speaks fluent English, Polish, French, and Vietnamese, in addition to having studied Latin, German, and Greek. She also enjoys traveling - having visited 30 countries so far -, wandering in all kinds of museums, and ballroom dancing.
