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Jennifer Wei Gersten is a violinist and writer from Queens, New York. A former tenured tutti violinist with Helsingborg Symfoniorkester (Sweden), she pursues solo and collaborative projects in new/experimental/improvised/??? performance, usually in the US and Scandinavia. Her feature reporting, essays, and music criticism appear in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Bloomberg, Rolling Stone, and The Washington Post, among other publications, on subjects that include experimental music designed for a fjord-side pool, “ugly” Nordic architecture, and smashing violins to smithereens.

Jennifer holds a doctorate and master’s in violin performance from Stony Brook University, where she was a winner of the 2022 concerto competition, performing Britten's Violin Concerto with the graduate orchestra. From 2022 to ‘23, Jennifer was based in Norway as a recipient of a Fulbright research grant and an American Scandinavian Foundation fellowship to report on and perform Norwegian contemporary experimental music. For recent strivings in the musical domain, including a site-specific quasi-improvised speculative durational beauty pageant, Jennifer received an honorable mention for Darmstadt Ferienkurse’s 2023 Kranichstein Music Prize.

In 2018, Jennifer won that year’s $10,000 Rubin Institute Prize in Music Criticism, granted by a panel of leading American music critics for “exceptional promise” in the field. Jennifer regularly writes liner and program notes as well as promotional materials for a range of international festivals, presenters, and artists. In collaboration with the Norwegian experimental label SOFA, she also hosted and edited SOFA STORIES, a podcast on three of SOFA’s pathbreaking musicians. Jennifer has additionally been an on-air essayist for the PBS NewsHour and a senior editor at Guernica, and spent formative summers as an editorial intern at NPR Music and as a newsroom reporting fellow at The Toledo Blade. She is an enthusiastic copy-editor, fact-checker, and editorial consultant for artists in need of someone to help them dot their i’s and cross their t’s. She can even do this for you if you ask nicely.

As a violinist, Jennifer has performed as a substitute with the Norwegian Radio Broadcasting Orchestra (KORK) and Stavanger Symphony Orchestra and as a guest with Ensemble Temporum (Norway), Craftsbury Chamber Players (US), and Concerts on the Slope (US). She has received fellowships from Tanglewood Music Festival, where she served as concertmaster; Lucerne Festival Academy, where she served as principal; Creative Music Dialogue; Kneisel Hall; Colorado College Summer Music; and numerous other programs. She has often collaborated with pianist and style icon Laura Davey in their contemporary-focused duo Double Standard. As an improviser, she performs in different constellations in New York and Oslo.

Jennifer received her undergraduate degree from Yale University, where she majored in English and concentrated in creative nonfiction and, as a senior, received the Wrexham Prize in Music. She was a finalist in the 2015 Norman Mailer Four-Year College Writing Awards for an essay about her mother, an amateur ballroom dancer, that served as the genesis for her senior thesis project on the Asian American ballroom community of Flushing, NY.