CCMA Adjudicators

Mei Han (Ph.D.) is Professor of Music and the founding Director of the Center for Chinese Music and Culture at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU). An internationally acclaimed zheng artist and ethnomusicologist, Han has forged a distinctive career that brings Chinese musical traditions into dialogue with contemporary performance and cross-cultural collaboration. Her work has significantly expanded the artistic possibilities of the zheng, the Chinese long zither, while establishing her as a leading scholar and educator of Chinese music.

Han began studying the zheng at age eleven with the legendary master Gao Zicheng. She became a professional musician in 1975 and joined the prestigious Zhan You Ensemble in Beijing in 1979, performing throughout China and recording for China National Radio and the China Record Corporation.

After moving to North America, Han emerged as a pioneering figure in contemporary zheng performance. Her work spans traditional Chinese music, symphonic and chamber music, New Music, World music, creative improvisation, and electroacoustic music. As a soloist, she has appeared with the China Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, and Calgary Philharmonic. Her international performances include appearances at the Kennedy Center, Smithsonian Freer Gallery in the USA; National Arts Centre in Canada; Concertgebouw in Amsterdam; WOMAD, Rainforest World Music Festival, and National Museum of Ethnology in Japan. She has also appeared on NPR, CBC, BBC, ABC Australia, NHK, and CCTV.

Han has released eight solo and chamber music albums, receiving two Juno Award nominations and a nomination for Best World Music Album from the UK’s Songlines magazine. Her boundary-breaking performance practice has itself become a subject of scholarship, including a case study in Sound Changes: Improvisation and Transcultural Difference (University of Michigan Press, 2021).

Han received her Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from the University of British Columbia and holds master’s degrees from UBC and the Music Research Institute of the Chinese National Academy of Arts in Beijing. Her research focuses on Chinese and East Asian music, performance, aesthetics, and musical traditions. She authored the “zheng” entry in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (2001), contributed numerous entries to The Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments (2014), and has published book chapters and scholarly articles in English and Chinese. Her academic honors include the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Her distinctive position as both performer and scholar was recognized by pioneering ethnomusicologist Bruno Nettl in The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-Three Discussions (2015).

A leading educator of Chinese music internationally, Han has founded and directed Chinese music ensembles at four North American universities and serves on the faculty of the Silkroad Ensemble’s Global Musicians Workshop. In 2015, she founded the Center for Chinese Music and Culture at MTSU, which she has developed into a vibrant hub for research, education, performance, and cultural exchange between China and the United States.