Ania Vu

Ania Vu (née Vũ Đặng Minh Anh) is a Polish composer and pianist of Vietnamese descent whose work explores the interplay between language, time and the sounds of the natural world. Drawing on her multilingual background, she often crafts original poetry in Polish and English as part of her compositional process—a method she calls “composing text to write music.”

Praised by The Boston Globe for “artful vocal writing [that] ranges from percussive whispers to glinting, pure-voiced lines,” Vu’s works have been performed across four continents and featured at various festivals including Tanglewood, SEAMUS, the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, the Mostly Modern Festival, CHIMEFest, the Red Note Festival, PASIC, and Tage Neuer Musik in Regensburg. She has held fellowships with the American Opera Project’s “Composers & the Voice”, Tanglewood, and residencies at Yaddo, Copland House and I-Park. Her music has been commissioned or performed by leading ensembles such as the JACK Quartet, Ensemble Dal Niente, the Grossman Ensemble, Sō Percussion, the International Contemporary Ensemble, the Daedalus and Mivos Quartets and the Chicago Composers Orchestra, and conducted by Ken-David Masur, David Fulmer, Stefan Asbury and Ben Bolter. Since 2022, she has been a member of the Polish Composers Union.

Vu is also a performing pianist in the standard and contemporary repertoire. She has premiered and performed her works and those of her colleagues—most recently, she performed her piano works at the Chelsea Music Festival as their 2024 Composer-in-Residence. She has also performed at the Polish Consulate in New York City, the Hanoi Opera House, the University of Chicago, the Wolf Humanities Center at the University of Pennsylvania, Illuminate Women's Music, and the Skalny Center at the University of Rochester alongside soprano Paulina Swierczek. Vu counts Vincent Lenti, Irina Rumiancewa-Dabrowski, and her mother Hong Anh Dang as her principal teachers.

Before joining Pomona, Vu taught at Northwestern University, the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Chicago, where served as the 2022-23 postdoctoral researcher at the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition.

Premiere of Unveiling by the JACK Quartet and commissioned by the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, August 2025

Premiere and commission of 2<> by Ben Melsky and Kyle Flens from Ensemble Dal Niente, at Chicago Constellation, July 2025

Various performances at the Chelsea Music Festival as the 2024 composer-in-residence in June 2024

Premiere of small tenderness for vocal sextet and string quartet at Ozawa Hall, commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Joyce Linde at Tanglewood’s Festival of Contemporary Music, July 2023

Premiere of feathered beings by the Grossman Ensemble and commissioned by the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition at the University of Chicago, January 2023

Performance of t(h)rills at the SEAMUS National Conference at the DiMenna Center, New York City, April 2023

Selected Recordings

2024 Transition & Apotheosis | Society of Composers, Inc.: 35th CD Volume
2023 Marimba Trips – Tomasz Arnold
2022 New Music by Living Composers, vol. 3. Petrichor Records
2022 New Music by Living Composers, vol. 1. Petrichor Records