1. Miya Masaoka's work encompasses contemporary classical composition, improvisation, electroacoustic music, inter-disciplinary sound art, sound installation, traditional Japanese instruments, and performance art.
12 Facts About Miya Masaoka
1. 2.
Miya Masaoka has created performance works and installations incorporating plants, live insects, and sensor technology.
3.
Miya Masaoka has been awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, the Doris Duke Award and the Herb Alpert Award, and a Fulbright Fellowship for advanced research for Noh, gagaku and the ichi gen kin.
4.
Miya Masaoka is an associate professor in the MFA Visual Arts Department at Columbia University, and the director of the MFA Sound Art Program.
5.
Miya Masaoka holds an MA from Mills College where she received the Faculty Award in Music Composition.
6.
Miya Masaoka's teachers included Alvin Curran, Maryanne Amacher and David Tudor.
7.
Miya Masaoka has created works for voice, orchestra, installations, electronics and film shorts.
8.
Miya Masaoka has sewn and soldered handmade responsive garments and mapped the movement of insects and response of plants and brain activity to sound.
9.
Miya Masaoka founded and directed the San Francisco Gagaku Society under the tutelage of Master Suenobu Togi, a former Japanese Imperial Court musician who traced his gagaku lineage more than 1000 years to the Tang Dynasty.
10.
Miya Masaoka initiated and founded the San Francisco Electronic Music Festival in 1999.
11.
In 2004, Miya Masaoka received an Alpert Award in the Arts, and she previously was given a National Endowment for the Arts and a Wallace Alexander Gerbode Award.
12.
Miya Masaoka received the Doris Duke Performing Artist Award in 2013, and a Fulbright Scholarship for Japan, 2016.