Praised by The Wire for music of “iridescent delicacy” and described as “superb,” Dr. Anqi Liu is a composer, interdisciplinary multimedia artist, photographer, and filmmaker whose work moves across acoustic composition, free improvisation, electronics, modular synthesizer, traditional Mongolian choor khuur, multimedia performance, interactive systems, and audiovisual ecologies. Her solo synthesizer album was described by Boomkat as “detailed, narrative-driven sound that traipses across the physical and historical world,” while The San Diego Union-Tribune praised her orchestral work How Light Arrives... for its unique musical color and compositional introspection. Her portrait album Veiled Erosion was released by KAIROS and received international critical acclaim, with reviews and features from de Volkskrant, Sonograma Magazine, Reportersonline, musique machine, El Compositor Habla, and Peter Margasak in Nowhere Street, who recognized her practice that has “veered from all conventional pathways.”

 

Liu’s written, freely improvised, electronic, and interdisciplinary media works have circulated internationally across the United States, Europe, Mexico, and Asia. Her work has appeared at venues, festivals, conferences, and institutions including KM28 Berlin, Sun Space, Pen + Brush, Coaxial Arts Foundation, Automata Theater, Oracle Egg, The P.I.T., Downtown Music Gallery, Le Poisson Rouge, Shapeshifter Lab, MIRY Concertzaal, Hotelier Porto, the Palace of Fontainebleau, Elektronmusikstudion EMS, the International Computer Music Conference, New Interfaces for Musical Expression, Ligeti Zentrum Hamburg, Every Woman Biennial, Project [Blank], Reiefestival, Bludenzer Tage zeitgemäßer Musik, Neofonía Festival de Música Nueva, ACTOR at McGill University, Dog Star Orchestra Festival, Darmstädter Ferienkurse, IRCAM ManiFeste Academy, Ensemble Dal Niente Summer Residency, Kalv Music Academy, and many others.

 

These experiences belong to the life that formed Liu, yet her current practice is slowly moving away from existing artistic ecologies and toward the question of how another ecology might be built. Her work asks who is allowed to enter, who has the power to select, fund, invite, present, and legitimize, and why artists are so often taught to organize their sense of possibility around being chosen. Instead of seeking more successful inclusion within the same structures of validation, Liu asks how those structures might be retuned, so that artistic life can grow from real human experience, sustained interaction, and shared forms of care rather than selection.

 

Her practice unfolds within what she calls the Ecology of Fraysonics, a framework that treats fieldwork, composition, technology, and performance as forms of threshold dwelling. Born and raised in Inner Mongolia, Liu’s work is shaped by the full texture of having lived there, through childhood, adolescence, family, ordinary routines, social relations, emotional landscapes, and the subtle transformations of everyday life. Inner Mongolia enters her work as a lived ground of perception, later deepened through years of research with Indigenous Mongolian song and bowed-fiddle traditions. Across diasporic, improvisatory, and technological practices, she approaches knowledge as something encountered rather than extracted, allowing relation, memory, fragility, and endurance to remain audible without being reduced into extractable form.

 

Liu is half of the Motl/Liu Duo with bassist Kyle Motl, the Liu/Bourdeau Duo, and the cross-disciplinary āññā Duo with Han Zhang. She is also a member of A Happy Mennn, an interdisciplinary multimedia performance trio with Han Zhang and Mingyong Cheng that addresses the lived experiences of Asian immigrant women artists building careers, practices, and lives in the West through technology, sound, free improvisation, and performance art. Beginning June 2026, Liu serves as Assistant Professor and Music Production Program Lead at Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design, where she helps shape the BFA in Music Production and develops curricular pathways across sound, technology, multimedia practice, and interdisciplinary art education. She holds a Ph.D. in Music Composition from the University of California San Diego, an M.A. in Music Composition from Rutgers University, and dual degrees in Music Performance and Law from Xiamen University.