Born in Houston to a musical family, Cher Liu started her piano studies at age three with her mother, Rong Cindy Tan, and violin studies at age six with Yongchun Li. Under the guidance of Fredell Lack, she decided to pursue music as a career at the Cleveland Institute of Music where she a current senior studying piano with Dr. Daniel Shapiro and violin with Joan Kwuon. She has also worked with artists Ivan Zenaty, Paul Kantor, Ilya Kaler, Michael Frischenschlager, Jinjoo Cho, Dami Kim, Kevork Mardirossian, Kikuei Ikeda, Anita Pontremoli and Joela Jones. Recent awards include the JCCAA Scholarship (2017), Dorothy Kelley Competition Scholarship (2015), the Schmidbauer Competition (1st, 2014). She made her orchestral debut with the Fort Bend Symphony Orchestra playing Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 9 in 2011 and with the Houston Civic Symphony playing Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2 in 2014.
She plays with the Corylus Quartet, one of three string quartets selected to participate in the Advanced String Quartet Program at CIM. Their mentors include
Si-Yan Darren Li, Todd Phillips, Peter Salaff, and Stanley Konopka. They have also worked with members of the Emerson, Orion, Danish, Miami, Ehnes, and Cavani Quartets. In February of 2019, at the invitation of Sharon Robinson, the quartet performed in the Music for Food Benefit Concert in Cleveland, helping to provide 1,500 meals for hungry families in Northeast Ohio.