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Jennifer Wei Gersten is a violinist and writer from Queens, New York. She lives in the south of Sweden, where she pursues solo and collaborative projects in new/experimental/improvised/??? performance and is also a full-time tutti violinist with Helsingborg Symfoniorkester. For recent strivings in the musical domain, including a site-specific quasi-improvised speculative durational beauty pageant, she received an honorable mention for Darmstadt Ferienkurse’s 2023 Kranichstein Music Prize. Recently, Jennifer was based in Norway as a recipient of a 2022-23 Fulbright U.S. Student Program open research grant and an American Scandinavian Foundation fellowship for research on Norwegian contemporary experimental music. She holds a DMA and 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.

Jennifer has lately served as a substitute with Norsk Kringkastingsorkesteret and Stavanger Symfoniorkester and as a guest with Ensemble Temporum (NO), Craftsbury Chamber Players (US), and Concerts on the Slope (US). She has received fellowships from Tanglewood Music Festival, Lucerne Festival Academy, Creative Music Dialogue, Kneisel Hall, and various other summer programs. She has often collaborated with pianist and style icon Laura Davey in their contemporary-focused duo Double Standard.

Jennifer is also a journalist, essayist, and critic. She has reported on a Norwegian experimental music festival for The New York Times; on hacking violins to pieces for The New Yorker; on a Nordic social media movement opposing “ugly” architecture for Bloomberg CityLab; on student protests at Juilliard for Rolling Stone; and on practicing through a pandemic for The Washington Post, among many other subjects. In collaboration with the Norwegian experimental label SOFA, she hosted and edited SOFA STORIES, a podcast on three of SOFA’s pathbreaking musicians. Jennifer has also been an on-air essayist for the PBS NewsHour and a senior editor at Guernica. In 2018, she 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. She spent formative summers as an editorial intern at NPR Music and as a newsroom reporting fellow at The Toledo Blade. In addition to journalism, Jennifer regularly writes liner and program notes as well as promotional materials for a range of international festivals, presenters, and artists. She also works as a 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.