Fay Yu

Fay has been playing violin since the age of eight, appearing with various youth orchestras including the Rockland County Youth String Orchestra, Bergen Youth Orchestra, New York All-State Symphony and String Orchestras, and the All-Eastern Symphony Orchestra. As a member of the New York Youth Symphony at Carnegie Hall, Fay played under directors Samuel Wong and Miguel Harth-Bedoya, and won the Principal Second Violin Fellowship in her senior year. She spent her summers at Interlochen National Music Camp, New England Music Camp, and the Sewanee Summer Music Festival, and appeared as a soloist with the US Youth Ensembles for a European concert tour in 1993. Fay gave her debut solo performance of Mozart’s Concerto No. 4 with the Rockland Symphony Orchestra at the age of 13. She is a two-time violin concerto competition winner for the Rockland Music Teacher’s Guild, as well as a one-time piano concerto competition winner, and a recipient of the Morning Music Club scholarship. She also acted as the Associate Music Director and rehearsal pianist for her school’s musical theater program and performed in the pit orchestras of various productions including Sweeney Todd, The Mikado, West Side Story, and Wonderful Town. She went on to earn her BA in Music from the University of California at Berkeley, where she performed regularly with the University Symphony as Principal Second Violin under director Jin-Dong Cai, various chamber music groups, and as a freelance musician in the San Francisco Bay Area. She holds a Master’s Degree in Musicology from the CUNY Graduate Center where she focused on film music, and is a former member of the Daedalus String Quartet. Fay took a left turn into television after graduate school and has produced and developed programming for Food Network, HGTV, BBC, Destination America, TLC, and is currently covered in puppies at Animal Planet. She lives with her bluegrass-obsessed husband, Elton John-worshipping daughter, two cats, a piano, and a total of 9 (or so) stringed instruments in Brooklyn.