Hao Zhen is a composer, filmmaker, and pianist whose practice spans music, moving image, and installation. Her work explores sound as a material and relational process, engaging touch, distance, and forms of indirect transmission across acoustic and multimedia contexts. She approaches composition as a site of inquiry into how sound travels between bodies, objects, and environments. She graduated from Vanderbilt University with double majors in Film Studies and Music Composition, and later joined the Words, Text, Voices, Music program at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, where she studied with Liza Lim. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Composition and Sound Practices at the University of Chicago. Her chamber opera The Lullaby, created in collaboration with the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) and director Lindy Hume, premiered in October 2024 at the Parade Theatre in Sydney and was featured in Limelight magazine’s October 2024 issue (“Fostering Opera’s Future”). In 2023, she was selected for the Flinders Quartet Emerge Program, where she composed a work exploring the permeability between musical notation and Zhuangzi’s notion of the dispossessed body. Her music has also been presented by the Sydney Philharmonia Choir, the Sydney Art Song Festival, and koto master Satsuki Odamura. Equally formative are workshops she has led internationally in the United States, China, and Australia with non-musicians, exploring graphic-score improvisation and collective sound-making with everyday materials. One recent workshop, Listening Through Materials: String Phones, invited participants to build working and non-working string telephones from recycled materials, approaching sound transmission as tactile, material, and visible. Hao is the recipient of the Sue Brewer Award, the Potter Opportunity Award, and the Doris Burnett Ford Scholarship. Her music and films have been presented internationally, with recent collaborations including Ensemble Dal Niente, clarinetist Heather Roche, ~Nois Quartet, the Critical Sounds (Chicago), and cellist Liam Battle. Her chamber work Moon Swim was presented at the Luella Bennack Music Center in San Antonio.