Vienna Teng

folk · chamber pop · singer-songwriter

Vienna Teng, born Cynthia Yih Shih in 1978, is an American singer-songwriter and pianist from Saratoga, California, working across folk, chamber pop and indie folk. The daughter of Taiwanese parents, she sang with the Stanford Harmonics a cappella group while earning a computer science degree at Stanford in 2000, then worked as a software engineer at Cisco Systems before leaving to sign with Virt Records in 2002. Her debut Waking Hour appeared that year and reached a national audience through NPR's Weekend Edition in January 2003, followed by an appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman. Warm Strangers followed on Virt in 2004; it closes with a hidden recording of the 1950s Taiwanese standard Green Island Serenade, one of her few performances in Mandarin. She moved to Rounder Records for Dreaming Through the Noise (2006), Inland Territory (2009) and Aims (2013), the last of them inspired by Detroit and toured as a trio with percussionist Alex Wong and multi-instrumentalist Jordan Hamlin, both of whom played on the record. Teng has opened for Joan Baez, Brandi Carlile, India.Arie, Duncan Sheik and Madeleine Peyroux, and her writing draws on classical piano technique and a cappella arranging as much as on folk song form. Since Aims she has released music only occasionally, including the 2024 project We've Got You, a pair of songs written so that each stands alone but the two can also be played simultaneously as a mashup. She completed an MBA and a master's degree in environmental science at the University of Michigan in 2013 and now works full time on renewable energy at McKinsey and Company, keeping a limited concert schedule; she lives in Washington, D.C.

Official site

Subscribe to this calendar

Upcoming shows in Washington, D.C.

Where they play in Washington, D.C.

Past shows in New York

Where they play in New York