Mabel Kwan - Piano

Pianist Mabel Kwan is a founding member of Ensemble Dal Niente. She tours with improvised music group Restroy, synthesizer duo Mega Laverne and Shirley, and electronic/instrumental trio Uluuul. Mabel is a 2018 High Concept Labs Artist and 2017 3Arts Awardee. She is recognized for her work in classical, improvised, and experimental music. Her self-produced work is a meditation on sound, contradictions, and our perceptions of what is familiar or strange.

Since 2006 Mabel has lived in Chicago, where she sings vocals with the Lucky Bikes, plays piano with Fifth Season, and plays chamber music with Bridging Memory Through Music, a therapeutic intervention for patients with dementia. Mabel volunteers for TECHNE, an organization that works with young girls to build electronic instruments and improvise using music technology. 

A native of Austin, Texas, Mabel studied piano with Eun Young Lee, Danielle Martin, and Timothy Woolsey. She received piano performance degrees from Rice University studying with Brian Connelly, and Northern Illinois University with William Goldenberg. 

Mabel has performed solo and collaboratively at the Palacio de Belles Artes, Museo Nacional del Arte, MusicArte Festival (Panama City), Guangzhou Symphony New Music Project, Sonic Fusion Festival (Edinburgh), No Hay Banda (Montreal), SALT Festival (Victoria), Omaha Under the Radar, Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival, EMPAC, Ravinia, Millennium Park, Library of Congress, Walt Disney Hall, Metropolitan Museum, and Art Institute of Chicago.

Mabel's 2016 debut solo album, one poetic switch (Milk Factory Productions) features works written for her on piano and clavichord. In the same year she released a solo clavichord album, Inventions (Parlour Tapes+) in collaboration with composer Danny Clay and artist Andrew Barco. In 2018 Mabel released the premiere recording of the complete Trois Hommages (New Focus) by Georg Friedrich Haas. Mabel plays on Ensemble Dal Niente's albums Balter/Saunier (New Amsterdam) with rock band Deerhoof, and on the George Lewis portrait album Assemblage (New World).