An internationally-acclaimed pianist, multidisciplinary artist, theorist and composer, Dr Jocelyn Ho engages practice and scholarship in a dialogic process to challenge and enliven contemporary concert practices. She is Lecturer (Musicology) as a Horizon Educator within the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. Previous to her return to her Sydney, she held an Assistant Professor of Performance Studies position (tenure-track) at University of California-Los Angeles. Ho’s performance interests center on the two ends of the spectrum: new music and historically informed performance. As a music researcher, she has published in the areas of embodied cognition and gestures, music and technology, and early recording analysis. Her accolades span theoretical research and experimental performance, including the 2022 Society of Music Theory Emerging Scholars Award for Articles, the SMT Post-1945 Music Analysis Interest Group Publication Award,and the 2021 International Alliance for Women in Music Ruth Anderson Prize for sound installation. Recognised for her “surprisingly unrelenting physical technique” (The Australian) and ability to “draw unbelievably beautiful sonorities from the piano” (2MBS Magazine), Ho has also won multiple piano competition prizes.

Ho’s artistic practice involves integrating bodily experience into new experimental performance artforms, and rethinking the classical music genre through multimedia technologies, inter-disciplinarity, and audience interactivity. She directs music-art-technology performance projects, working closely collaborators hailing from MIT, Parsons School of Design, Stony Brook University, and UCLA. As a Hellman Fellow, Ho led award-winning NIME projectWomen’s Labor, winning the Harvestworks Artist Residency and a place as in the 2022 Creative Capital Shortlist.In her sold-out music-art-tech concert projectSynaesthesia Playground, she directed fifteen composers, visual artists, technologists, and fashion designers to create inter-sensory works in an interactive piano recital that involved audience improvisation, premiered by Ho at Spectrum NYC. Her projects have been featured across the globe, including at MACBA Barcelona, Design Museum of Chicago, NYC Governors Island, CCRMA at Stanford, UCLA Art|Sci Gallery, New Music Gathering, Splice Festival, NIME, and ISEA.

As pianist and composer, Ho has performed and has had her compositions premiered at venues such as Sydney Opera House, Radialsystem Berlin, Melbourne Recital Centre, New York Symphony Space, Radio France, Boston Isabella Gardner Museum, Spotify’s NYC Headquarters, NSW Parliament House and Victorian Governor’s House. Championing new music, she has been a feature pianist at the NYC Electroacoustic Music Festival and faculty pianist New Music For Strings, premiering new works by composers in collaboration with members of the Emerson Quartet and Friction Quartet. Her album, “Luminous Sounds,” featured in her feature interview in Limelight Magazine, received a five-star review in 2MBS Fine Music Magazine. She is a founding member of Sydney Piano Trio. Her sound design work with renowned sculptural artist Nobuho Nagasawa has been featured at Stony Brook Art Faculty Exhibition and University of Florida Art Gallery.

In her research, Ho draws on gesture studies, embodied cognition, and performance analysis to understand how the body is involved in creating meaning, through lenses of non-Western cultures, race, and gender studies. By creating new, performer-oriented analytical methodologies, Ho provides tools to visualize and articulate performers’ bodily wisdom that are often overlooked, but lies at the center rather than the margins of musical experience. Specializing in the areas of historical recording research, new music, and NIME, her writings are published in journals such asMusic Theory Online, Women and Music, La Revue Musicale OICRM, Naxos Musicology International,edited volumesDebussy’s Resonances(University of Rochester Press, 2018) andTopos of Music III(Springer Press, 2018), as well as in New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME), international Symposium for Electronic Arts (ISEA), and Mathematics and Computation in Music (MCM) conference proceedings. Ho received her Doctor of Musical Arts from Stony Brook University, where her teachers include Gilbert Kalish (piano) and Arthur Haas (historical keyboards). Ho is a Steinway Artist.