Violinist Sheena Lan, recently acclaimed by the Chicago Tribune as having a sound “well-matched and expressive”, joins the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra as an acting member for the 2024-2025 season. Sheena is also a regular substitute violinist for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in addition to her duties as the Associate Concertmaster of the Illinois Symphony Orchestra, by appointment of Music Director Ken Lam in 2022.

After beginning violin and piano studies in her native Taiwan, Lan went on to study with a full-scholarship at the National University of Singapore’s Yong Siew Toh Conservatory with Zuo Jun, and subsequently pursued  graduate degrees at Indiana University with Mark Kaplan and Ellen dePasquale. She was also a fellow for two summers at the Tanglewood Music Center, where she held multiple leadership chairs in the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra and performed under the batons of Andris Nelsons, Alan Gilbert, Dima Slobodeniouk, and Susanna Mälkki. Her other formative summers were at festivals such as the Banff Centre for the Arts and the Great Mountains Music Festival with artists such as Anne-Sophie Mutter, Cho-Liang Lin, Ida Kavafian, and Donald Weilerstein. Sheena’s chamber music studies are with members of the Cleveland, Alban Berg, Juilliard, Takács, and Emerson quartets.

Before moving to the United States, Sheena also taught in the El Sistema system in rural Puli, Taiwan, where she led the orchestral and piano programs.

Owing to her belief in music as a fundamentally interdisciplinary pursuit, Sheena is also well-known to audiences in Asia as a singer and pop artist, rising to prominence with a featured single on the Taiwanese release of Fast and the Furious 7. She is also a member of the pop group “Four Friends”, under the management of Skyhigh Entertainment Co. Ltd. The group has released multiple albums totaling tens of millions of streams, and were featured performers at the Taipei 101 New Year’s Countdown in 2013. The group can still be heard across music
outlets throughout Asia.

When not performing, Sheena is an avid baker and espresso fanatic, and is often found on non-concert days at Interval Coffee on Milwaukee’s East Side!