In this edition of Sips & Sounds, meet Moab Music Festival’s 2026 composer-in-residence, Grammy-winning cellist Andrew Yee! Join Artistic Director Tessa Lark in sipping a drink, listening to short performances from Andrew’s Halfie project, and engaging in conversation about their commissioned work which will premiere at the 34th Annual Festival this September. 

About Andrew
Andrew is a Grammy-Award winning cellist praised by Michael Kennedy of the London Telegraph as “spellbindingly virtuosic”. Trained at the Juilliard School, they are a founding member of the internationally acclaimed Attacca Quartet who have released several albums to Critical acclaim including Andrew’s arrangement of Haydn’s “Seven Last Words” which Thewholenote.com praised as “ . . .easily the most satisfying string version of the work that I’ve heard.” They were the quartet-in-residence at the Met Museum in 2014, and have won the Osaka and Coleman international string quartet competitions. Their newest recording of the string quartets of Caroline Shaw won a GRAMMY for best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble performance. As a soloist last season Andrew performed John Taverner’s The Protecting Veil and Strauss Don Quixote. In 2019 they won the first prize at Oklahoma University’s National Arts Incubation Lab for their pitch of a wearable garment that translates sound into vibrations for the hard of hearing. They like to make stop-motion videos of food, draw apples, cook like an Italian Grandma and have developed coffee and cocktail programs for award-winning restaurants (Lilia, Risbobk, Atla) in New York City. 

Their solo project “Halfie” draws on their experience as a bi-racial and non-binary person in having access to multiple communities at once, while not feeling at home in any of them.

 They play on an 1884 Eugenio Degani cello on loan from the Five Partners Foundation.