Christen Lein


Management:

Jean Renard
starmanager@gmail.com
TR Management Group Inc., Los Angeles & Stockholm

Bookings: christen@itsnotaviolin.com

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Official Bio:

Classically trained violist Christen Lien performs original compositions on viola that are a beautiful mixture of East and West musical traditions, classical and postmodern, acoustic and electronic. Lien’s debut album is called Vol. I: Battle Cry and it reflects a journey of challenging and expanding classical viola expression. Lien incorporates layers of live electronics effects with her viola creating hybrid music and expressive performance art.

Lien has collaborated with respected contemporary artists that showcase her genre-crossing abilities, such as Def Jam poets Steve Connell and Sekou Andrews, Grammy-winning DJ iLL MEDiA, Grammy-nominated beatboxer Christylez Bacon, and many others in the jazz, rock, hip-hop, electronic, and classical genres.

Christen Lien began her studies of the viola at age 8, and was trained in the Suzuki method. In her youth she was an understudy of The Cleveland Orchestra (COYO), and was a member of the National Youth Guild Symphony Orchestra, an orchestra that showcased the leading young musicians from throughout the United States at the regarded Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Other notable concert halls and venues include Severance Hall, the REDCAT Theater of the Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Detroit Institute of the Arts, and the Vieve Gore Concert Hall. Lien and her viola have performed at major contemporary venues in North America including Zanzibar, The Vanguard, Café Central and the House of Blues, as well as state-of-the-art science centers and at numerous universities. The diversity of her venues and fan demographic is evidence of her category-defying sonic exploration of music.

Christen’s experience also spreads beyond music, to the literary and film world. After college Lien worked with John Cusack’s production company, New Crime Productions, where she learned valuable organizational skills that led to a transformational role in rebirthing the Ann Arbor Film Festival (AAFF). Under Christen’s leadership as Executive Director of the AAFF, Variety magazine named the AAFF one of the top ten film festivals in the world, openly impressed by the First Amendment lawsuit she launched against the government for violating the First Amendment (see Ann Arbor Film Festival v. The State of Michigan). Determined to protect artists’ rights to free speech and uncensored creativity, Lien stood up against government censorship, won the historic lawsuit and transformed laws granting access to funding for artists.

Today she dedicates her time to her music, in pursuit of her own creative voice and passions. Lien’s goal is to foray into new musical territory with compositions that bridge electronic, industrial and classical genres, while redefining how the world understands and experiences the viola as an instrument. Always studying the human condition as the inspiration behind her content and perpetually working to create new and successful business models for independent artists, Christen Lien provides audiences with passionate live performances of original music that have been called “uncannily ancient and reassuringly contemporary,” and “a bridge to the divine.”

In her words, the inspiration behind Vol. I: Battle Cry:

“VOL. I: BATTLE CRY is a musical depiction of the emotional journey we each take to unlock our power. I wrote this album to support you in finding and releasing your battle cry in a moment in time when we are faced with what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. described as the “fierce urgency of now” — when our vigilance or neglect determines the fate of generations. In each of us lives a unique passion – a dream that wants to be worked into reality. It is critical for your dream to be manifested, for your gift to be given, for your power to be brought forth if we are to rise together and overcome our collective challenges. My dream is that this music will support you, as you step into your power and offer all you have to give.”

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