Alexina Louie Overview

Alexina Louie is a Juno-Award winning composer and has been commissioned to write major works for most of Canada’s leading performers, ensembles, and orchestras. Her works have also been performed internationally. She was born in Vancouver in 1949, and is the... [more]

Alexina Louie is a Juno-Award winning composer and has been commissioned to write major works for most of Canada’s leading performers, ensembles, and orchestras. Her works have also been performed internationally. She was born in Vancouver in 1949, and is the child of second-generation Canadians of Chinese decent. She graduated from the University of British Columbia with a Bachelor of Music in Music History in 1970 (she had also attended composition classes of Cortland Hultberg). She then went on to post-graduate work at the University of California at San Diego with Robert Erickson and Pauline Oliveros, completing her Masters of Arts in Composition in 1974. Remaining in California for the rest of the decade, Louie taught piano, theory and electronic composition at the City Colleges of Pasadena and Los Angeles. She has lived in Toronto since 1980, where she works as a freelance composer for concert, dance, television and film. Her uniquely personal style, rooted in a blend of East and West, draws on a wide variety of influences—from her Chinese heritage to her theoretical, historical and performance studies. [show less]