Lucia Hwong

Lucia Hwong
Lucia Hwong and her Pipa (a Chinese lute), January 2012. Photo by Marco Glaviano
Born	Hawaii
Occupation	American composer

Lucia Hwong is an American composer and instrumentalist. She has created music for theater, film, television, dance and the concert stage.

Hwong was born in Hawaii and raised in Los Angeles, California. Her grandmother was a grande dame of Chinese opera and her mother is international actress Lisa Lu. Her first public performance was in concert, playing the pipa, an ancient Chinese lute, at the age of six. She studied ethnomusicology, theater and dance at UCLA and Columbia University from 1978 to 1982, graduating with a B.A., Cum Laude, in Ethnomusicology.

She has chaired philanthropic events for organizations including the Women's Project, American Theatre Wing, Asia Society and Parrish Art Museum and has been on committees such as Southampton Hospital.

Her music for theater includes the scores for the Tony Award-winning Broadway production of M. Butterfly and Tony-nominated Golden Child; as well as David Henry Hwang's New York Shakespeare Festival presentations of Sound and Beauty and The Dance and the Railroad and the Obie Award-winner FOB. She composed the music for Iago and Venus Voodoo at Lincoln Center.

Hwong also scored the Mark Taper and McCarter Theatre premieres of Anna Deavere Smith's Twilight: Los Angeles 1992 and created a 12-tone fugue for Joyce Carol Oates' The Perfectionist. Among her dance scores, Fierce Attachments debuted at the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival. She also scored Ali MacGraw's Yoga Mindbody and created music for the Guggenheim Museum's Soho video wall.