Carolyn Chen was born in New Jersey and is currently a Phd student at UC San Diego. Recent projects include Hamlet, for percussion ensemble red fish blue fish, human windchimes, and an abstract comic strip transcription of the Book of Job.

Current performance/installation/film collaborations with Clint McCallum, Ian Power, Zeynep Bulut, Merve Kayan, and Lili Chin. Performances by Ensemble Surplus, Ostrava Banda, orkest de ereprijs, New York Miniaturist Ensemble, and bodies, at Young Composers Meeting in Apeldoorn, Ostrava Days, Sommerakademie Schloss Solitude, California Exchange Concerts, International Women?s Electroacoustic Listening Room, Poto, and UCSD's Spring Festival of New Music.

Force through inaction. Camouflage. Inspection of grain. Currently researching bleakness. Nothing ends.

BA in Music and MA in Modern Thought and Literature, Stanford, 2006 (piano studies with Thomas Schultz, composition with Erik Ulman, honors thesis on free improvisation and radical politics); MA in composition, UCSD, 2008 (advisor, Roger Reynolds). Honors: Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans (2008), Sudler Prize for Excellence in the Creative Arts (Stanford, 2006), Humanities and Sciences Prize in Music (Stanford, 2005), Undergraduate Research Programs Major Grant (Stanford, 2004, 2005), American Composers Forum Subito Grant (2009).