Aiyun Huang

Aiyun Huang is a Taiwanese-Canadian percussionist, researcher, and academic. She is a professor at the University of Toronto Faculty of Music, where she serves as head of the percussion area and directs the University of Toronto Percussion Ensemble.

Huang was born in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. She earned a Bachelor of Arts in music performance at the University of Toronto (1995), studied at the Conservatoire National de Région de Rueil-Malmaison in France, where she received the Premier Prix diploma in 1996, and completed both a Master of Arts (1998) and Doctor of Musical Arts (2004) in contemporary music performance at the University of California, San Diego under Steven Schick.^[1]

From 1997 to 2006 she was a member of the percussion ensemble red fish blue fish and in 2001 she co-founded the Canadian new music trio Toca Loca.^[2]

Between 2004 and 2006 she was a faculty fellow at the University of California, San Diego. In 2006, she joined the Schulich School of Music at McGill University as assistant professor, later becoming associate professor and chair of the percussion area. She directed the McGill Percussion Ensemble^[3] and was a member of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology (CIRMMT). In 2014 she was named a William Dawson Scholar, a distinction she held until 2018.^[4]

In 2017 Huang returned to the University of Toronto as associate professor of percussion. She later became full professor and head of the percussion area, directing the University of Toronto Percussion Ensemble.^[5] She also directs the Technology and Performance Integration Research (TaPIR) Lab, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).^[6]

• First Prize and Audience Prize, Geneva International Music Competition (2002)^[7]
• Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (2024)^[8]