Weiyang Ding (b. 1998) is a composer and multi-disciplinary artist who finds beauty, excitement, mercy, and forgiveness in observing and presenting everyday absurdities. She creates works to tell her side of the story, aiming to express, describe, and bond. She is obsessed with combining music with movement, body, and space in various ways of storytelling, and she explores storytelling through chamber and orchestral works, live electronics, motion-sensor technology, visuals, and theater works. The themes of her works span from mimicking creatures on this planet, stuttering, and human interactions, to the slow-burning anger and long-lived dark humor in womanhood.

Weiyang’s music has been performed in the US, Europe, and China in venues such as Roulette, the Performing Arts Library at Lincoln Center, the Museum of Chinese in America, The Stone, and the Hindemith Music Centre. Her works have also been presented at events and festivals including Composers Now Dialogue, New Music on the Point, Valencia International Performing Arts Summer Festival, SoundSCAPE, and Divergent Studio. She has had the opportunity to work with renowned groups such as JACK Quartet, Mivos Quartet, loadbang Ensemble, and Ensemble Contemporaneous. Her string quartet piece Five Mini Dramas of Human Observation, which explores four string players performing together on a single cello, was named a finalist for the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award.

These days, Weiyang enthusiastically explores various roles aside from instrumental writing as well. She curates, directs, and writes scripts/text for her own music theater work As Naked As Possible and her chamber opera The Clinging Shore. She scores music for devised theater and physical theater works by director friends. She performs stand-up comedy in her own multidisciplinary project AHHHHHHHHH. She curates composers’ concert series as a department assistant at Mannes Composition.

Weiyang is currently graduating as a post-master’s diploma composition student at the Mannes School of Music, studying with Huang Ruo. She holds a Master’s degree in Composition from the Mannes School of Music and a Bachelor’s degree in Architecture from Hunan University.