NYC-based pianist and educator Fifi Zhang has performed in venues throughout New York City, including Carnegie Hall, Park Avenue Armory, Miller Theatre, Joyce Theater, and Steinway Hall, as well as concert halls in Finland, Spain, South Korea, and Poland. She has a keen interest in contemporary classical music and has worked closely with numerous composers, including Meredith Monk, Frederic Rzewski, John Harbison, and Gabriela Lena Frank. She especially enjoys collaborating with dancers and has performed solo and chamber music alongside members of the Malpaso Dance Company and School of American Ballet.
At age eleven, Fifi made her debut with the Washington Metropolitan Philharmonic playing the Saint-Saëns G minor concerto, as the national grand prize winner of the Washington Metropolitan Philharmonic Concerto Competition, and is one of a few musicians to have won both the Junior (2008) and Senior (2010) divisions of the MTNA (Music Teachers National Association) high school piano competition. In 2016, she was a finalist in the Juilliard Concerto Competition. Fifi has spent summers studying and performing at Tanglewood Music Festival, the Banff Centre, Sarasota Music Festival, Chautauqua Institute, and New Paltz Piano Summer.
An alumnus of the Columbia-Juilliard Exchange, Fifi holds a BA in History from Columbia University and an MM in Piano Performance from Juilliard. She is also a graduate of Mannes School of Music. Her teachers have included Ursula Oppens, Pavlina Dokovska, Matti Raekallio, Julian Martin, and Marjorie Lee.
Fifi is currently a doctoral candidate at CUNY Graduate Center, where she is working on a critical examination of classical music performance through a phenomenological lens. As a recipient of the Graduate Center Fellowship, she is on the music history faculty at Hunter College.
