Lucy Yao

Ann Arbor + hometown show with the amazing @guitar.yaz and @nicgareisslfi for my dad’s 75th birthday!🥹🥹💖💖😭😭 this one was so special. We’ve been wanting to collab for YEARS and either a tornado or illness or some other act of god interfered. Until this moment!! It’s also been a bittersweet year full of changes, as my dad turns to a new chapter (goodbye childhood home, hello Tiffany!) and so many discoveries about what a musical and fulfilling creative life means. I’ve been thinking a lot about my mom. How do we honor the past and our loved ones and still create a future that we want to be part of? How do we make room for new loved ones and family? I’ll let you know if I figure it out. Nothing too revelatory here to share on that front except that I’m so honored to be making music and having these chances. ft. all the favorites!! lunchtime karaoke warmup, a sendoff at zingermans, signing the wall @the_ark_ann_arbor , 🎶🎶

@whylucywhy & @anastasia.the.pumpkin playing a duo set to open the #COPEFEST weekend! 🎟️ get your tickets today through link in our bio! ABOUT COPEFEST COPEFEST is @cope_collective ’s annual festival of new music, bringing together composer-performers, ensembles, and solo artists for a weekend of premieres and collaborative work from the NYC experimental music community. ABOUT COPE COLLECTIVE COPE is a collective of composer-performers and creative professionals working together to make new music—free from the time, financial, and creative limits of the industry. We operate through collaborative labor exchange: by contributing to each other’s projects, we bring new works to life. Together with 35+ East Coast-based artists, we’re creating a more equitable, supportive, and vibrant music community.

Baby’s first live Wagner!!!! @whylucywhy and I saw Tristan und Isolde this week. So grateful we bought tickets back in late November.

just jumping out of the snow trash pile to say hello!! and I am HEALTHY again!!! here’s some sponge moments while in + out of recovery this past season. featuring slower days, smelling the flowers, planting seeds and learning and absorbing so much inspiration from ruth asawa, (can you make art about art? What do the shadows of your words, your words and your music, look like?), incredible storytelling and art by samora pinderhughes, and drawing the through line. And I played my first groupmuse in years!! First time diving back into more standard chamber music, but don’t worry; still plenty of chaos, toy pianos, and sparkles. It’s ever evolving and I am so grateful to be able to be growing with it ❤️. This is the year of the fire horse, which means it’s time to reshape and reimagine how to bring people together, how to collaborate, resist, and to create after a heavy year of unlearning. Wishing you all a happy and joyous year that is filled with hope and (the era of no fucks given) and resilience ❤️🌶️ TLDR: life is fully happening and I’m on substack now lol, subscribe for updates on events I’m producing/hosting/performing + musings! 📸: @natedidomizio

coming out of a practice session to say hey! 👋 Come hang with me and @jay.julio this valentine’s in a program about all types of love (Brahms and Clara? 👀), featuring pieces we love and even some jazz standards and one of my favorite tunes from bill evans, “my foolish heart” ❤️. It’s been a minute since I’ve played groupmuses but I love that they’re so open, welcoming, and about meeting new people who also love music. rsvp at link in bio + make sure to check out all of the awesome house (and cozy venues!) concerts all around! 🥳🎻🎹

(Sharing from LinkedIn soo TLDR I’m in Boston, come say hi in the storm!? ☃️🥶 ) so excited to be coming back to MIT as a organizer and speaker this year! I’ll be sharing my experience working across XR, Storytelling, and the Performing Arts in my talk, “Designing for Belonging: Finding the story through Storytelling + XR”. I’ll also be sharing this work with the students at The Clubhouse Network and am SO excited to hear their ideas and build together with Gustavo Madrigal, M.A. Ed. ᯅ and Sultan Sharrief!! It’s kind of impossible to put one label or box on it, so, I’m starting this year by embracing all of the messiness and beauty of discovery that the arts and creating with communities has offered. Will be sharing the process behind “Failtopia”, my project that won in 2023, as well as the lessons I’ve learned being Artist + Innovator in Residence at Purdue University and Texas A&M University. So many things to share just from working with the incredible teams there with Dorothy Chan, Todd Wetzel, Michael Armintrout, Esteban Garcia Bravo, Ann McNamara, James R. Ball III, Kylee Friederichs and Edgar Rojas Muñoz and the incredible faculty + students! If you’re in town, would love to say hello!! 📸: @lizkiger ❤️ shooting engagement + LinkedIn pics in the same shoot aaayyy!!

December: I played a gig with one of my dearest friends @anastasia.the.pumpkin before we both got taken out for the rest of the month by pneumonia + bronchitis + a cocktail of illnesses. (We are both on the mend now!) Not really pictured: the doctor + nurse calls, insurance frustration, in + out of urgent care and ER, pneumonia, moving during the middle of it and Dylan staying up all night to pack, our first Christmas away from my dad. It’s been a season of change, and also, I’m not really on instagram anymore! But I wanted to share some moments that brought me joy. I believe music is a triple threat— create and tell stories with people you love, make the audience feel like they are connected to what you are creating, make the moment feel like you are all connected, and that when you leave, that moment is something that you can grow. Maggie Roger’s says in her NYU commencement speech, [more than anything] “Music is not a game. Music is not an industry. It is a practice.” To 2026, to staying healthy w/ copious amounts of vit C, to being with who you love, to opening your heart to love those who are different than you, to choosing to grow with the people you love because of and being wiser for it. I’ll be (probably? I hate IG) posting some events coming up, but just email/text me if you want updates ❤️ Thanks to the folks at @pac_nyc for hosting us🎄❤️ pictured: playing at @pac_nyc , @tawny.nyc ‘s first chamber jam session, a lovely new year telling our fortunes given to us by lovely @luisa.muhr , see tags

Tonight’s the night!! Join us for an exciting evening of music and laughs with Opera Atlantic’s Tales for a Starry Night @operaatlantic 🎶 @helenawateroussoprano 🎹 @whylucywhy 🎬 @lizkiger

thank (someone that) SOMEONE documented this! Had a great time colliding worlds and sharing “Designing Moments of Belonging” at @xrguildnyc how my practice as a composer and pianist merges with creating stories and concerts with Augmented Reality! Love to build off the work @stanforddschool designer Susie Wise is doing in design + belonging ❤️ If Ravel can find a way to transform the human voice into an underwater symphony, why can’t we turn parks and gardens into places where our memories and stories live with music? Still trying to find words to describe it — is AR an evolving podcast, a Pokémon go but for music + story, an immersive concert, or something else? Yes and! tysm @xrguildnyc and @zaysunal for inviting me. Hope that designers, techies, and artists can find ways to bridge story with tech and find the heart of the story ❤️🎹 (Also yes that’s kissin playing Schubert! 🥹)

ahh!!! Super stoked to be joining my dear friend and badass Yasmin Williams at National Sawdust on 9/20! Gonna be a lush lineup of strings, prepared piano, and maybe even a toy piano 🐣🎹✨ I met Yaz in 2021 where we played chamber orchestra arrangements of her album, Urban Driftwood. So excited to be playing with Yaz again- hope to see ya there ❤️ ➡️for some other 2021 throwbacks including my other “sister” + @chromic_duo ‘s first AR Soundwalk w/ @nyphilharmonic ! 🎸💕 guitar + magic @guitar.yaz 🎻 violin Leandria Lott 🎻 violin Jordan Pettis 🎻🎻viola Monique Smith 🐣🎹 pianos 🙋‍♀️ tix at @nationalsawdust !

🌸in between inspiration, moments in life where even as things fall apart, finding care + community in the forms of encouragement from the friendly elderly couple who pushed me to “go for it! shoot your shot and talk to them!!”, being reminded of how to see color through Renoir + Monet (and 🦥), feeling the power of stories told and unhidden in Jerod Lew’s “Strange You Never Knew”. Even though our stories are different, I see threads in what we share in our mothers- the stories we imagine. 🌸* sharing @chromic_duo work in how storytelling shapes our communities and creates Intergenerational healing tomorrow. I believe in the work and the seed that we’ve planted in 2020, starting from responding to the spikes in anti-AAPI hate crimes. And as we see today, these acts of violence against people who are most vulnerable — we need to strengthen our communities. Strengthen our ability to imagine something different for our futures. Look into our past and see what we can learn from our families, traditions; and ask ourselves: what has served me, what do I want to keep? * What do we want to leave behind and how do we move forward? Bridging stories with music, interviews from the AAPI community, weaving them into installations and performances where we practice compassion- it’s an honor to be able to share it. 🌸Join us tomorrow at CUNY’s AAARI symposium on “healing during uncertainty”. Super excited to be learning and sharing, growing + shifting ❤️

Jan-March: “excuse me what am I playing??” 😱😨🌪️ this has been a really difficult passage of time but here’s some moments of good things, good people. And a reminder that being with people and sharing our dreams and vulnerabilities can remind you of what is possible ❤️ 🐠snapshot while on-site for our AR Soundwalk “ocean of memories” where we developed an audio viz app for site specific storytelling for @tamu and the heat almost got to us 🫠 🪩 hosted a Q1 Girl Dinner Review Party where we all realized goal of having a 4-pack 🦾😆 thank you to @yitingintech for helping me plant the seed! 🌿 🍁hopped on our first group trip ever?? to Montreal and learn about Canadian sugar shacks and try frozen maple! 👩‍🏫 learning music with Dylan in my teacher voice (we eventually got it) that’s it!! hope you’re ok, spring is coming 🌱