Sandra Tsing Loh is an L.A.based writer/performer/musician. Her books, all published by Riverhead Books, include a novel, If You Lived Here, You'd Be Home By Now, which the Los Angeles Times named one of the best books of 1997, Depth Takes A Holiday: Essays From Lesser Los Angeles, and Aliens In America. The latter is based on Loh's solo Off Broadway show which ran at Second Stage Theatre in New York in summer, 1996. She will return to Second Stage for Bad Sex With Bud Kemp, her next solo show, to premiere in April, 1998. Loh has also been featured at the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, the HBO New Writers Project, and on NPR's "This American Life." She is also a regular commentator on NPR's "Morning Edition," a show which coincidentally has used segments from Pianovision as buttons. Currently, Loh is most musically active as a composer for film. She composed and performed on the score for Jessica Yu's 1997 Oscarwinning documentary Breathing Lessons: The Life and Work of Mark O'Brien, and is scoring Ms. Yu's next documentary on HBO of the Living Museum. Sandra also has appeared on tour performing her darkly comic semi-autobiographical tale of growing up middle class Chinese-German in Southern California - "Aliens in America."
Loh began in the mid'80s as a performance artist; her piano concert "spectacles" were covered by such outlets as People, the Wall Street Journal, GQ, Glamour, the Associated Press, CNN, and even in Johnny Carson's Tonight Show monologue. Nearly 1,000 people attended "Night of the Grunion" (March 1989), in which Loh and the Topanga Symphony played a concerto for spawning fish on a Malibu beach at midnight. In "Self Promotion" (March 1988), an assistant flung $1,000 in autographed $1 bills over her as she performed before a stampeding crowd. "Spontaneous Demographics" (September 1987) featured Loh playing a piano abord a flatbed truck in a concert for rush hour commuters on the Harbor Freeway.
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