For clips, please see the “Writing” tab; for recordings, please see under “Music.”

Jennifer Wei Gersten is a violinist and writer from New York City. At home and abroad, particularly in Scandinavia, she works as an instigator and performer of avant-garde and improvised music projects. Jennifer’s feature reporting, essays, and music criticism can be found 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 musician, Jennifer is mainly engaged in the creation of idiosyncratic sounds and situations for her instrument. She often does so as an improviser in experimental contexts: her 2026 debut record as half of the experimental violin-bass duo Goal Weight, 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 composer-musicians Jo David Meyer Lysne, Inga Margrete Aas, Luis Fernando Amaya, Isaiah Ceccarelli, and Joan Arnau Pàmies, Jennifer is also amidst the development of new works for solo violin. Her projects have appeared or are forthcoming at MATA Festival, Scandinavia House, Oracle Egg, Emily Harvey Foundation, Rhizome DC, and Darmstadt Ferienkurse, amongst other places.

Jennifer is also active in classical and neuemusik chamber contexts. She is a former tenured tutti violinist with Helsingborg Symfoniorkester (Sweden) and has appeared as a substitute or guest with ensembles that include The Rhythm Method, the Norwegian Radio Broadcasting Orchestra, Stavanger Symfoniorkester, Bergamot Quartet, TAK Ensemble, and Ensemble Temporum (Norway). With the pianist and style icon Laura Davey, she performs in the duo Double Standard. During fellowships, Jennifer served as concertmaster of the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra and co-concertmaster of the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra.

Jennifer holds a DMA and an MM 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, a senior editor at Guernica, and an editorial intern at NPR Music.

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.