Biography

KIT YOUNG

As a pianist/improviser-composer and music researcher, Kit Young integrates in her performing and teaching practice a path of inclusive curiosity encouraging audiences to engage with diverse, sometimes unfamiliar, musical worlds through the familiar piano. At Howard, she teaches studio and class piano, piano pedagogy and literature, coaches piano accompanists for the dance department and assists the classical voice department as a collaborative pianist. 

Recently, In March, 2026, Ms. Young and Classical Voice Coordinator Angela Powell Walker presented “Great Day! Honoring Marian Anderson” in Bangkok, Thailand. This project, supported by Gitameit Friends USA, was a series of concerts and workshops at Rangsit, Chulalongkorn Universities and Princess Galyani Vadhana Institute of Music and Bangkok Arts and Culture Centre all celebrating Miss Anderson’s 1957 Far East tour and program. 

Ms. Young’s long residency in Thailand from 1992 to 2003 led to her many performances of new music by Thai composers found on the recordings “TRI” and “Akhanee Kita”. She was a many-time grant recipient from the Asian Cultural Council in New York for theater collaborations with Thai and Burmese musicians and actors.  She also served as a piano faculty member of Sri Nakarin Wiroj and Payap Universities where she initiated a piano festival and “Lanna Chamber Music Festival” for young Thai pianists and teachers. 

Ms. Young was the first American pianist to study and perform Burmese  “sandaya” - the piano played using techniques of Burmese music and instruments -  an aural not notated tradition. Her first performance in 1991 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with Burmese colleagues was broadcast on the Voice of America.  Ms. Young lived in Myanmar from 2003 to 2008 and co-founded Gitameit Music Institute to help young adults learn Western music skills scarce at that time.  She also composed music for multi-media theater with Burmese and international artists  “Night - Moon - Dance” and “The Monster of Inya Lake”. She has given performance-talks on Burmese music at Mahidol University, Yong Siew Toh Conservatory in Singapore, College of Music, University of the Philippines, Hong Kong Baptist University, Western Academy Beijing, College Music Association, Music Teachers National Association, Burma Studies Conference, University of Washington, University of Richmond, Northern Illinois University and other venues.  She has written chapters on Burmese music topics in Longing for the Past: The 78 RPM Era in Southeast Asia and Musical Childhoods in Asia and the Pacific.

When living in Beijing from 2008-2011, Ms. Young performed with the Beijing New Music Ensemble, participated in intercultural improvisational performances with Gu Qin player Wu Na at China Conservatory, Art District 798 and Western Academy Beijing where Ms. Young taught piano.  After her return to Washington, D,C, Ms. Young collaborated on a theater work “Sandaya: Burmese Lessons” produced at Atlas Theater in 2013, and presented her own devised work in 2019 at the International Emily Dickinson Sociey Conference:  “What Miss Dickinson Heard -and didn’t ” which explores Emily Dickinson’s poems about music featuring duo-pianists, a “rhapsodist” narrator and vocal quartet in improvised settings. 

Kit Young earned a Master of Music in Piano Performance from the New England Conservatory and pursued doctoral studies at the University of Michigan and the Peabody Conservatory. Before living in Asia, she taught in the piano departments of University of Richmond and University of Maryland Baltimore County.