Born in 1984, Taiwanese composer Ya-Jhu Yang’s works have been heard throughout North America, Europe, and Asia. She was raised and educated at the National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei, and completed graduate degrees at the Manhattan School of Music and the Curtis Institute of Music, where she studied with composers including Richard Danielpour, Jennifer Higdon, and Nils Vigeland.


As a 2009 prize winner in the Washington International Competition, Ms. Yang’s piano trio Letters to Formosa was performed at Washington D.C.’s Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. She has since received commissions from Philadelphia’s Rock School of Dance Education, National Taiwan Recital Hall Artists, the Philadelphia Orchestra Association, the Main Line Chinese Culture Center, and the Curtis Institute, among others. Her opera scene The Falcon, which was commissioned by International Opera Theater through the American Composers Forum’s Philadelphia chapter in 2010, was produced and premiered in November 2010 at Prince Theater (PA), and later toured Italy, receiving productions in Città delle Pieve and Saluzzo.

Ms. Yang often collaborates with dancers, visual artists, and poets. Besides her ballet suite for the Rock School of Dance Education, her song cycle Rain Out at Sea was set to poetry by Jeanne Minahan, with accompanying visual art by Emogene Schilling. In the fall of 2011, Ms. Yang produced the inaugural concert of the Main Line Chinese Culture Center, in which she brought instruments from Eastern and Western traditions together, and invited dancers and choreographers from Opus 1 Dance Company to create new choreography for a famous piece of pipa repertoire, Green Waist.

Ms. Yang is the music director and organist of St. Peter's Lutheran Church, Lafayette Hill, and is associate music director of the Pennsylvania Girlchoir, where she conducts the elite Motet choir. She frequently arranges and composes for both institutions. As a pianist and flutist, Ms. Yang has given many recitals at churches in the New York, Philadelphia, and Delaware areas to benefit church missions and arts organizations. In 2016, Ms. Yang and her husband started Celtic to Classical, a summer concert series based in southern Delaware, which brings together their musician friends from all over the states together to produce fun, engaging, and genre-eclectic concerts.