Steven Ruochong Cui

Born in 2006, American pianist Steven Ruochong Cui started studying piano at the age of four under various teachers in his hometown of Chengdu, China. After being admitted into Juilliard Pre-College in 2017, he began studying with Dr. Yoheved Kaplinsky and Dr. Yi-Heng Yang. Steven currently attends both Juilliard and the Dwight-Englewood School in Englewood, New Jersey. He is an alumnus of National Public Radio (NPR)’s From The Top, a fellow at the Artemisia Foundation, as well as analumnus of the Lang Lang International Music Foundation.

Steven participated in various music festivals such as the Aspen Music Festival  in Colorado (2019, 2022) and the Oxford Piano Festival in England (2022). He attended piano masterclasses with Hung-Kuan Chen, Gary Graffman, Jerome Lowenthal, Arie Vardi, Fabio Bidini, Terrence Wilson, Emanuel Krasovsky, Yulia Chaplina and Alain Lefère. As a soloist, he performed with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra and the Little Orchestra Society in New York. He has won several international piano competition such as the 24th International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition for Children and Youth (2016), the 3rd Catholic University of America Piano Competition (2016) and the 2nd International ArtePiano Competition (2022).

Besides music, Steven is very active in his academic pursuits. He is the founder of the first student newspaper in the middle school at Dwight-Englewood and currently serves as the grade-level leader in student government and editor at the high school newspaper.