An invaluable new-music advocate and a preferred collaborator of composers like Pierre Boulez and Esa-Pekka Salonen” (New York Times), Grammy- and Emmy-winning pianist Gloria Cheng has long been devoted to creative collaborations with composers of our time. She has been a concerto soloist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta and Pierre Boulez, and on its acclaimed Green Umbrella series under Esa-Pekka Salonen and Oliver Knussen. She has been a recitalist at the Ojai Music Festival (where she began her association with Boulez in 1984), Chicago Humanities Festival, William Kapell Festival, Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music, Mendocino, and Chautauqua Music Festivals, and annually on Los Angeles’s Piano Spheres series. She has premiered and been the dedicatee of countless works that include John Williams’s Prelude and Scherzo for Piano and Orchestra, Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Dichotomie, and John Adams’s Hallelujah Junction for two pianos. In duo-recitals with the composers, she premiered Thomas Adès’s two-piano Concert Paraphrase on Powder Her Face and Terry Riley’s Cheng Tiger Growl Roar. Winner of the Best Instrumental Solo Performance (without orchestra) Grammy for her 2008 recording Piano Music of Salonen, Stucky, and Lutosławski, she received a second nomination for her 2013 disc The Edge of Light: Messiaen/Saariaho. Her film project, MONTAGE: Great Film Composers and the Piano, featuring Bruce Broughton, Don Davis, Alexandre Desplat, Michael Giacchino, Randy Newman, and John Williams, aired multiple times on PBS SoCal and won the 2018 Los Angeles Area Emmy. Garlands for Steven Stucky was her 2018 star-studded CD tribute to the late composer by 32 of his friends and former students. Her education includes a BA in economics from Stanford University, a Woolley Scholarship for study in Paris, and graduate degrees in performance from UCLA and the University of Southern California, where her teachers included Aube Tzerko and John Perry. She teaches graduate seminars and chamber music at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music.