Ying, Kwang-I received her doctorate in composition from the University of Maryland, where she also earned a master’s degree in piano performance. Her teachers at the University were Lawrence Moss in composition, and Bradford Gowen and Thomas Schumacher in piano. During the summer time with full scholarship, she has studied with Jean-Bernard Pommier in piano at Academie de Musique Lausanne, Switzerland in 1987; and has studied with Alain Louvier, Betsy Jolas and Andre Boucourechliev in composition, and Idil Biret and Michel Beroff in piano at Conservatorie Americain de Fontainebleau, France in 1988. She has won the National Capital Area Composers’ Consortium Competition, the First Prize of the Helen Wadefield Hoback Composition Competition, and 1988 Outstanding Young Women of America Awards while she was studying at the University of Maryland.

Before she went to study in the U.S. her teachers were Hsu Tsang-Houei, Shih Wei-Liang and Lu Yen in composition, Tzei Yea-Sheue, Liu Su-Mei, Alexander Sung in piano. She is the author of The Structure of Chopin Nocturnes-after 1840, Cultivation of Music in Five Years, and Notes of Mind, and currently on the faculty at National Sun Yat-sen University in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, Republic of China. Prof. Ying is active as a pianist as well as composer. Her compositions have been performed in numerous recitals in the U.S. as well as in France, Germany and Asia. A critic from the Washington Post wrote, “…pianist Ying, Kwang-I gracefully and elegantly opened the evening with her 1985 work ’Moods’. These five delightful, short but by no means insignificant gems explore a delicate world of pianistic colors and ideas.”