Chika Wie

Chika was born in Nagoya, Japan, where she started with the Suzuki Method from age  four. She moved to the United States at age ten and enrolled at the Colburn School of Performing Arts, where she participated in private lessons, Suzuki classes, chamber music, and orchestras, and served as a concertmaster for the Orchestra de Camera. Her primary teachers have included Chan Ho Yun, Virginia Frazier, Sherry Cadow, Nawomi Ishida, and Jun Maekawa, and she studied chamber music with Shun-Lin Chou, Andrew Duckles, Richard Naill, Deborah Aitken, Anne Diener Zentner, and Clayton Haslop. She also participated in masterclasses by Cho-Liang Lin, Mark Kaplan, Martin Chalifour, Corey Cerovsek, and Evan Wilson.

She has been teaching in Southern California since 2005 and her students have earned positions as section principals of local school and youth orchestras and have won several concerto competitions. She earned her Bachelor of Music degree in Violin Performance from Cole Conservatory of Music at California State University at Long Beach, where she also completed a California teaching credential in Mathematics. She has served as String Specialist for the South Bay Youth Orchestra and was Assistant Director for the South Bay Youth Chamber Ensemble. She is a member of the Suzuki Association of the Americas (SAA), and has completed SAA Registered Training including Every Child Can! and Violin Units 1, 2, 8, 9, and 10.

A frequent concerto competition winner throughout her high school and college years, she has performed with the Los Angeles Doctors Symphony, CSU Long Beach Symphony, Colburn Orchestra da Camera, and many others. She has performed solos with orchestras in Southern California as well as Austria, Czech Republic, Slovenia, and Italy. She was the Executive Director of the Community Youth Orchestra of Southern California (CYOSC) until June 2020. After her departure, she founded Musissho.org, an online music community during the COVID-19 Pandemic to provide free weekly Suzuki Play-Ins and music appreciation classes. She is currently the Co-Director of Summer Music Festival at Choate Rosemary Hall in Connecticut.