Alyssa Tong
YAI Manager, Violin
Alyssa Tong has managed the Young Artist Institute of Chamber Music Northwest since its inception in 2022. During the academic year, she is currently the Assistant Director of Enrollment Management at the New England Conservatory, working with the Strings and Contemporary Musical Arts faculty.
In 2018, after sustaining a tendonitis injury while playing violin, she dove into the administrative world, founding String Insiders, an educational non-profit that focuses on providing pre-professional string players access to teachers, resources, and information. Since 2020, String Insiders has hosted the Online Solo Strings Intensive (OSSI) every summer, created in response to the COVID-19 pandemic as the first ever online music festival. OSSI gives over 100 students annually the opportunity to work closely with top professors and teachers from around the country. Alyssa formerly hosted the Strings Virtual Summit, an online conference with over 1,000 attendees at each iteration that provided access to interviews with leading music professionals free of charge. Through her work with String Insiders, she has worked with faculty members such as Clive Greensmith, Soovin Kim, Paul Kantor, Ani Kavafian, Paul Katz, Carol Rodland, and many others. She is passionate about increasing accessibility to classical music by revitalizing the concert stage, providing quality music education to youth, and opening conversations around careers and holistic musicianship.
Before working full-time in administration, she obtained her Master’s degree in Violin Performance from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, studying under Simon James. Previously, she studied under Nelson Lee of the Jupiter String Quartet at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign School of Music. When she’s not buried in spreadsheets, you can find her exploring Boston where she lives, or cooking something new.