PUBLIQuartet has held artist residencies at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and National Sawdust, and has performed everywhere from Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center to the Montreal, Newport and Detroit Jazz Festivals. Their 2016 appearance on The Colbert Report, “Requiem for a Debate” – in which they improvised a live soundtrack to the third presidential debate – not only received over a million views, but saw the Washington Post declaring them “the winner…indubitably.”

The quartet’s latest album, the GRAMMY®-nominated What Is American, released in June 2022 on the Bright Shiny Things label, explores resonances between contemporary, blues, jazz, freely-improvised, and rock-inflected languages, all of which trace their roots back to the Black and Indigenous musical traditions that inspired Dvorak’s “American” String Quartet (Op. 96). The album also includes CARDS 11-11-2020, written by Roscoe Mitchell for PUBLIQuartet, as well as works by Ornette Coleman, Rhiannon Giddens, and Vijay Iyer.

Committed to creating an inclusive performance space, supporting living composers of varying genres, and expanding the classical canon, PUBLIQuartet was the inaugural ensemble-in-residence for Carnegie Hall’s PlayUSA program in 2021-2022, working with high school music classes across the country on a large-scale creative project called Reflections on Resilience. Their innovative PUBLIQ Access program has promoted emerging composers by presenting a wide variety of under-represented music for string quartet–from classical, jazz and electronic, to non-notated, world and improvised music. Other unique projects include MIND | THE | GAP, a series of creative projects developed by PQ that weave together different styles of music via group composition, arranging, and improvisation. These unique works range from “Bird in Paris” (Claude Debussy meets Charlie Parker) to more recent extended works including Reflections on Beauty, a multimedia celebration of the life and legacy of Madam C.J. Walker featuring visual projections and narration by Walker’s great-great-granddaughter, A’Lelia Bundles.

Founded in 2010, PUBLIQuartet is based in New York City.

In international competition with pianist Tyler Wottrich, in March of 2017, Clara became the first ever American prize winner when she placed second at Thomas Quasthoff’s International Das Lied Competition in Heidelberg, Germany. Later that year, the duo was also one of four to reach the finals in the very prestigious Wigmore Hall/Kohn Foundation Song Competition in London, and Clara was awarded the Richard Tauber Prize for the best interpretation of Schubert Lieder. She recently won the Radio-Canada People’s Choice Award, third place in the song division at the 2018 Concours Musical International de Montréal, and the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society Prize for best interpretation of British Song at the 2019 Wigmore Hall/Kohn Foundation Song Competition.

Performance highlights include concerts with Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, Music of the Baroque, Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, Kansas City Symphony, Handel and Haydn Society, The Schubert Club, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, her debut with Minnesota Opera as Mrs. Herring in Britten’s Albert Herring and Wigmore Hall Recital debut with Julius Drake. She has collaborated with many chamber musicians, including pianist Wu Han, The Lydian String Quartet, VocalEssence Ensemble Singers, the Minneapolis Guitar Quartet, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Salastina, Accordo, and Dark Horse Consort.

In addition to performing, Clara serves as the Artistic Director of Source Song Festival, a week-long art song festival in Minneapolis, Minnesota. This festival strives to create and perform new art song and cultivate an educational environment for students of song, including composers, vocalists, and collaborative pianists. She received her B.Mus. from North Dakota State University with Dr. Bob Jones, M.A. from the University of Iowa with Stephen Swanson, and continued study with Emma Small.

Li Jian was born in Shanghai in 1965 in a musical family. He is the son of the Chinese renowned violinist Yu Lina, who is best-known for the violin concerto The Butterfly Lovers. He began his music studies at the age of six and studied with professor Hong Teng at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. He continued his education at the Conservatoire Nationale de Paris, with Pierre Sancan, and The Curtis Institute of Music, with the legendary Mieczyslaw Horszowski, and studied conducting with Jorma Panula.

Jian Li gained worldwide recognition in 1981, when at the age of 16 he won the second prize in the prestigious Marguerite Long-Jacques Thibaud international competition in Paris. This honor brought him opportunities for playing in European countries including France, Italy, Germany and Britain. He was also the youngest musician chosen by the Chinese government to perform at the national reception honoring U.S. President Jimmy Carter on his historic visit to China. In 1989, he became the first Mainland Chinese musician to be invited to perform in Taiwan.

As a recitalist, he has performed in such prestigious music centers as Avery Fisher Hall and Alice Tully Hall in New York, the Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., Orchestra Hall in Chicago, Ambassador Auditorium in Los Angeles, the Musikverein in Vienna, the Theatre des Champs-Elysées in Paris, Suntory Hall in Tokyo, Symphony Hall in Osaka and Berlin Philharmonic Hall.He was Assistant Conductor of the New Jersey State Opera from 1998 through 2001. In 2000, he was conductor for the production of Verdi’s “Aida” in the Shanghai Arena, with over 80,000 people in attendance at each performance. Jian Li has been Artistic Director and Conductor of the Hunan Symphony Orchestra since 2003; and recently he has been named Artistic Director and Conductor of the Tokyo Virtuoso. Since 2004 Jian Li has also been Artistic Director of the Musicians Emergency Fund of New York.In an interview Jian Li said: “A musician doesn’t have to exhibit his own style. His nature is revealed with the music he plays. A good musician should focus on the music and the daring nature of the composer. Otherwise you’ll be wrong from the beginning.”

Flexible in size according to the demands of the repertory, Cappella Romana has a special commitment to mastering the Slavic and Byzantine musical repertories in their original languages, thereby making accessible to the general public two great musical traditions that are little known in the West.

In the field of contemporary music, Cappella Romana has taken a leading role in bringing to audiences the vocal works of such European contemporary composers as Michael Adamis, Ivan Moody, Arvo Pärt, and John Tavener, as well as promoting the work of North Americans such as Fr. Sergei Glagolev, Christos Hatzis, Peter Michaelides, and Tikey Zes.

The vocal ensemble presents annual concert series in Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington, in addition to touring nationally and internationally. Critics have consistently praised these for their unusual and innovative programming, including numerous world and American premieres. The group regularly collaborates with such artists as conductor Paul Hillier, chant specialist Ioannis Arvanitis, and composer Ivan Moody.

The ensemble is based in Portland, Oregon, in the Pacific Northwest of the United States.