Since July 2005, Co Boi Nguyen has been conductor and faculty member of the C.W. Post Chamber Music Festival, Long Island University, New York. She served as assistant conductor of the Cosmopolitan Orchestra in New York and led the ensemble in the first U.S recording of A. Tcherepnin’s Concerto for Harmonica and Orchestra last October.

A native of Hanoi, Nguyen returns regularly to perform and to give master classes. She made her highly acclaimed debut with the Vietnam National Symphony Orchestra at the Hanoi Opera House in July 2002, making her the first woman and the youngest conductor ever to lead the fifty-year-old ensemble.

An advocate of contemporary music, Nguyen conducted the world premiere of Tony Prabowo’s Requiem for Strings with the Mannes Orchestra in 1998, and appears in Juilliard’s annual Focus Festival.

Also a champion of world music, she was invited to participate in the Asia-Pacific Performance Exchange Program in 1997, a prestigious two-month gathering organized by UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Culture designed to foster cultural exchange among artists from Asia and the U.S.

Nguyen has participated in various summer programs, including the Vienna Conservatory of Music Exchange Program, and the Aspen Music Festival and School.

Among numerous distinguished awards, Nguyen was a Fellowship Grantee of the Asian Cultural Council, an affiliate of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, from 1997 to 2003, as well as a grant recipient of the Albert Kunstadter Family Foundation in 2002.

While she was a student at the Hanoi National Conservatory, Nguyen was invited to perform at the state reception for former president George H. W. Bush at the Municipal Hall of Hanoi during the president’s first visit to Vietnam in the fall of 1995.

Nguyen is a graduate of the conducting programs at the Curtis Institute of Music and the Juilliard School.