A recipient of the Rome Prize and the Berlin Prize, Ken Ueno, is a composer/vocalist/sound artist. Leading performers and ensembles around the world have championed Ueno’s music. His piece for the Hilliard Ensemble, Shiroi Ishi, was featured in their repertoire for over ten years, with performances at such venues as Queen Elizabeth Hall in England, the Vienna Konzerthaus, and was aired on Italian national radio, RAI 3. Another work, Pharmakon, was performed dozens of times nationally by Eighth Blackbird during their 2001-2003 seasons. A portrait concert of Ken’s was featured on MaerzMusik in Berlin in 2011. Other ensembles and performers who have performed Ueno’s music include Kim Kashkashian and Robyn Schulkowsky, Frances-Marie Uitti, Mayumi Miyata, Teodoro Anzellotti, Aki Takahashi, Alarm Will Sound, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Steve Schick and the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, the Warsaw Philharmonic, the Lithuanian National Symphony, the Paul Dresher Ensemble (with Amy X Neuburg), the Nieuw Ensemble, Neue Vocalisolisten, , the Del Sol String Quartet, Vincent Royer, the Bang on a Can All-Stars, the Cassatt Quartet, the New York New Music Ensemble, the Prism Saxophone Quartet, the Atlas Ensemble, the Orkest de Ereprijs, and the So Percussion Ensemble.

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Ueno’s music has been performed at prestigious venues around the world including Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MusikTriennale Köln Festival, Ars Musica, Warsaw Autumn, the GAIDA festival, Darmstädter Ferienkurse, the Muziekgebouw, the Hopkins Center, Spoleto USA, and Steim.  He has been the featured guest composer at the Takefu International Music Festival, the Norfolk Music Festival, the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, the Pacific Rim Festival, the Intégrales New Music Festival, and the MANCA Festival.

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As a vocalist, Ueno is known for inventing extended techniques and has performed as soloist in his vocal concerto with orchestras in Boston, New York, Warsaw, Vilnius, Bangkok, Sacramento, Stony Brook, Pittsburgh, and North Carolina.

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As a sound artist, his installations have been commissioned and exhibited by museums and galleries in Beijing, Guangzhou, Taipei, Mexico City, Art Basel, Los Angeles, and Hong Kong. In 2020, he created evening-long installation performances for the Osage Gallery, Tai Kwun, and at the FreeSpace. One of his largest projects, Daedalus Drones, an installation (a fence-labyrinth housing a swarm of flying drones choreographed for performance) installed at the Asia Society of Hong Kong was featured on the New Vision Arts Festival in 2021.

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Ueno currently serves as a Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. As an author, Ueno’s writings have been published by the Oxford Handbook, TDR, the New York Times, Palgrave Macmillan, and Wiley & Sons. He holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University and an M.M.A. from the Yale School of Music, and his bio appears in The Grove Dictionary of American Music.