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Jennifer Wei Gersten is a violinist and writer from Queens, New York. A former tenured tutti violinist with Helsingborg Symfoniorkester (Sweden), she instigates solo and collaborative musical projects in avant-garde and improvised performance, usually in the US and Scandinavia. Jennifer’s feature reporting, essays, and music criticism appear or are forthcoming in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Bloomberg, Rolling Stone, Gramophone, and The Washington Post, among other publications, on subjects that include experimental music designed for a fjord-side pool, “ugly” Nordic architecture, and smashing violins to smithereens.

As a violinist, Jennifer is mainly engaged in the creation of idiosyncratic sounds and situations for her instrument. She often does so as an improviser in experimental and “free” contexts: her 2026 debut record as half of experimental violin-bass duo Goal Weight, a collection of improvised songs titled Keep Telling Yourself That(Relative Pitch Records), has been described as “wildly inventive” (Squidco) and “where instrumental identity begins to fray” (New York City Jazz Record). With a roster of composer-musicians that includes Jo David Meyer Lysne (NO), Inga Margrete Aas (NO), and Luis Fernando Amaya (MX/NO), Jennifer is also amidst the development of new works for solo violin. Jennifer additionally works as an independent curator and producer, inventing memorable musical situations that tend to involve vast numbers of string players.

Jennifer is also commonly spotted in classical and neuemusik chamber contexts, appearing with groups that include The Rhythm Method, TAK Ensemble, Qubit, Ensemble Temporum (NO), and SEM Ensemble. She had previously served as a substitute with orchestras that include the Norwegian Radio Broadcasting Orchestra and Stavanger Symfoniorkester (NO); and as concertmaster of the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra and co-concertmaster of the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra. Jennifer has often collaborated with pianist and style icon Laura Davey in their contemporary-focused duo Double Standard.

Jennifer holds a doctorate and master’s in violin performance from Stony Brook University, where she was a winner of the 2022 concerto competition, performing Britten's Violin Concerto with the graduate orchestra. She is a recipient of a Fulbright and a two-time recipient of American Scandinavian Foundation grants for reporting on, performing, and commissioning Norwegian contemporary experimental music. For strivings in the musical domain, including a site-specific quasi-improvised speculative durational beauty pageant, Jennifer received an honorable mention for Darmstadt Ferienkurse’s 2023 Kranichstein Music Prize.

In 2018, Jennifer won that year’s $10,000 Rubin Institute Prize in Music Criticism, granted by a panel of leading American music critics for “exceptional promise” in the field. Jennifer regularly writes liner and program notes as well as promotional materials for a range of international festivals, presenters, and artists. In collaboration with the Norwegian experimental label SOFA, she also hosted and edited SOFA STORIES, a podcast on three of SOFA’s pathbreaking musicians. Jennifer has additionally been an on-air essayist for the PBS NewsHour and a senior editor at Guernica, and spent formative summers as an editorial intern at NPR Music and as a newsroom reporting fellow at The Toledo Blade. She is an enthusiastic copy-editor, fact-checker, and editorial consultant for artists in need of someone to help them dot their i’s and cross their t’s. She can even do this for you if you ask nicely.

Jennifer received her undergraduate degree from Yale University, where she majored in English and concentrated in creative nonfiction and, as a senior, received the Wrexham Prize in Music. She was a finalist in the 2015 Norman Mailer Four-Year College Writing Awards for an essay about her mother, an amateur ballroom dancer, that served as the genesis for her senior thesis project on the Asian American ballroom community of Flushing, NY.