Asian American Arts Alliance Awards Hongbo Cai and Devi Majeske the 2025 Van Lier Fellowships for Music
Among this year’s competitive applications, the review panel also bestowed a special award, Artist of Exceptional Merit, to recognize Mỹ Tâm Huynh for Music Composition and Sahana Shravan for Music Performance. The award celebrates the excellence of their work and leadership in the AAPI community. It also comes with a $500 unrestricted cash award and ongoing engagement with A4 including introductions and connections to resources and opportunities.
This fellowship is made possible with support from the Edward and Sally Van Lier Fund through the New York Community Trust. Created by the will of Sally Van Lier, the Trust carries out Edward and Sally Van Lier’s legacy of arts appreciation by supporting arts groups and training programs to provide education, training, or other support.
The 2025 Van Lier review panel was composed of respected leaders in the field of music: Shawn Choi, director of marketing at Kupferberg Center for the Arts at Queens College; Meera Dugal, program associate for arts and culture at the Mellon Foundation; Levy Marcel Ingles Lorenzo, a Bucharest-born artist whose work spans the intersection of music, art, and technology; Lesley Mok, a percussionist and A4’s 2021 Van Lier Fellow in Music Performance & Composition; and Satoshi Takeishi, a drummer, percussionist, and arranger.
“We are honored to administer Van Lier Fellowships to Hongbo Cai and Devi Majeske, two talented AAPI musicians who demonstrate incredible promise,” said Lisa Gold, A4’s Executive Director. “In a time of decreasing funding for creators, this fellowship plays a crucial role in uplifting Asian American artists, and we’re proud to champion their creativity.”
More information about the fellowship is available on A4’s website.
About Hongbo Cai
Hongbo Cai is an interdisciplinary musician, writer, and filmmaker whose work blends performance practice with contemporary media inquiry. A 2025 graduate of The Juilliard School with a master’s degree in music, he made his Carnegie Hall debut at 21 and joined the NYU piano faculty as an adjunct instructor at 22. As a soloist, he has performed with leading ensembles including the Shanghai Opera House, Shanghai Philharmonic, Xiamen Philharmonic, West New York Chamber Orchestra, Pazardzhik State Symphony Orchestra (Bulgaria), Mikhail Jora Philharmonic Orchestra (Romania), Florence Philharmonic, New York Youth Orchestra, Orquestra do Algarve (Portugal), and musicians of the New York Philharmonic. The Herald praised him as an “accomplished musician … with command of style and a refreshingly individual approach.”
Since 2022, he has served as an accredited press member at the Cannes Film Festival and has contributed film criticism and auteur studies to AHCI-indexed journals such as CINEFORUM. His films have been featured at the Beijing International Short Film Festival, Toronto International Independent Short Film Festival, and Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival.
Hongbo’s multimedia work has been selected for Juilliard’s Risk Lab Residency and the Community Impact Residency for US Emerging Artists (2025). His creative practice focuses on the indigenous rituals, folklore, and performative traditions of ethnic minority cultures, which he approaches as expressions of nature’s unrestrained vitality—materializing through dramatic landscapes, soundscapes, animal deities, and transformations across transdisciplinary media.
@hongbo_tsai
About Hongbo Cai
Hongbo Cai is an interdisciplinary musician, writer, and filmmaker whose work blends performance practice with contemporary media inquiry. A 2025 graduate of The Juilliard School with a master’s degree in music, he made his Carnegie Hall debut at 21 and joined the NYU piano faculty as an adjunct instructor at 22. As a soloist, he has performed with leading ensembles including the Shanghai Opera House, Shanghai Philharmonic, Xiamen Philharmonic, West New York Chamber Orchestra, Pazardzhik State Symphony Orchestra (Bulgaria), Mikhail Jora Philharmonic Orchestra (Romania), Florence Philharmonic, New York Youth Orchestra, Orquestra do Algarve (Portugal), and musicians of the New York Philharmonic. The Herald praised him as an “accomplished musician … with command of style and a refreshingly individual approach.”
Since 2022, he has served as an accredited press member at the Cannes Film Festival and has contributed film criticism and auteur studies to AHCI-indexed journals such as CINEFORUM. His films have been featured at the Beijing International Short Film Festival, Toronto
International Independent Short Film Festival, and Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival.
Hongbo’s multimedia work has been selected for Juilliard’s Risk Lab Residency and the Community Impact Residency for US Emerging Artists (2025). His creative practice focuses on the indigenous rituals, folklore, and performative traditions of ethnic minority cultures, which he approaches as expressions of nature’s unrestrained vitality—materializing through dramatic landscapes, soundscapes, animal deities, and transformations across transdisciplinary media.
@hongbo_tsai
About Devi Majeske
Devi Majeske is a Brooklyn-based sitarist, vocalist, and songwriter whose work bridges Indian classical traditions with genre-defying contemporary music. Raised between underground punk shows and singing devotional South Asian bhajans with her grandmother, Devi developed a sound as layered as her identity—where the spiritual meets the provocative. Her music seeks not only sonic innovation, but deep emotional connection. An active member of Brooklyn Raga Massive and Brooklyn Baithak, Devi is deeply involved in New York’s South Asian arts community, collaborating with artists across disciplines to push the boundaries of classical and experimental forms. Devi has performed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, WXPN, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and with the Philadelphia Public Orchestra. She has also been commissioned by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Indo-American Arts Council.
@airdevi.band
About Mỹ Tâm Huynh
Mỹ Tâm Huynh’s musical practice is shaped by her Vietnamese American upbringing, a deep education in Black American creative music (especially jazz), and a commitment to futurism. Her work explores questions of identity, culture, and values—often addressing themes like fragmentation, gender identity, biculturalism, and consumerism. These ideas are central to her project mitamu, which centers collective storytelling through improvisation and genre fluidity. Huynh is a graduate of the Manhattan School of Music (MM ’22) and Temple University’s Boyer College of Music and Dance (BM ’18). Upon graduating, she joined the Manhattan School of Music faculty in the Jazz Arts program. In 2023, she received the ASCAP Herb Alpert Young Jazz Composer Award and the ASCAP Phoebe Jacobs Prize, and held residencies with Wildflower Composers and Asian Arts Initiative. She was also named a semi-finalist for the Next Jazz Legacy program in 2023 and 2024. Her work is grounded in a vision of Asian futurism and decolonization through art.
@itsmitamu
About Sahana Shravan
Though violinist Sahana Shravan has an education in classical Western music, her origins are from a family steeped in Carnatic music of South India. The dialogue between these two styles, in addition to her love of pretty much all music, has led to a diversified set of skills that allows her to play the works of the classical Western canon while embracing the worlds of other genres. Her hope is to wield music as a tool for community building, youth education, and collaboration not just between artists, but between audiences and performers. She has a robust background in chamber music, community engagement, and concert curation and production, all skills that were developed during her two degrees earned at The Juilliard School, where she studied with Areta Zhulla and Catherine Cho.
@sahanashravan
