yuniya edi kwon

Photo by Bruce Clayton Tom

yuniya edi kwon (she/her) also known as eddy kwon, is a violinist, vocalist, poet, and interdisciplinary performance artist based in Lenapehoking, or New York City. Her practice connects composition, improvisation, movement, and ceremony to explore transformation & transgression, ritual practice as a tool to queer space & lineage, and the use of mythology to connect, obscure, and reveal. As a composer-performer and improviser, she is inspired by Korean folk timbres & inflections, textures & movement from natural environments, and American experimentalism as shaped by the AACM. Her work as a choreographer and movement artist embodies an expressive release and reclamation of colonialism’s spiritual imprints, connecting to both Japanese Butoh and a lineage of queer trans practitioners of Korean shamanic ritual.

In addition to an evolving, interdisciplinary solo practice, she performs and collaborates with artists of diverse disciplines, including The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Du Yun, Tomeka Reid, Holland Andrews, International Contemporary Ensemble, Kenneth Tam, Isabel Crespo Pardo, and Moor Mother. She has performed alongside Roscoe Mitchell, Mary Halvorson, Nicole Mitchell, Cory Smythe, Henry Threadgill, Susan Alcorn, Carla Kihlstedt, Jessika Kenney, Lesley Mok, Satomi Matsuzaki, and others. In 2023, she founded SUN HAN GUILD, a sound and performance collective with composer-improvisers Laura Cocks, Jessie Cox, DoYeon Kim, and Lester St. Louis. She is a recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Robert Rauschenberg Award in Music/Sound, Civitella Ranieri Fellowship in Music Composition, an Arts Fellow at Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts, a Johnson Fellow at Americans for the Arts, and a United States Artists Ford Fellow.