Zhou Long is internationally recognized for creating a unique body of music that brings together the aesthetic concepts and musical elements of East and West. Winner of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for his first opera, Madame White Snake, Dr. Zhou also received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, the 2012-2013 Elise Stoeger Prize from Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society. He has been two-time recipient of commissions from the Koussevitzky, Fromm Music Foundations, Meet the Composer, Chamber Music America, and the New York State Council on the Arts. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2015, Zhou Long and Chen Yi both were nominated the 58th Grammy Award. 

Born on July 8, 1953 in Beijing. Zhou Long enrolled in the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing in 1977. Following graduation in 1983, he was appointed composer-in-residence with the China Broadcasting Symphony. He travelled to the United States in 1985 under a fellowship to attend Columbia University, where he studied with Chou Wen-Chung, Davidovsky and Edwards, receiving a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in 1993. Dr. Zhou is currently Distinguished Professor of Music at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory of Music and Dance. 

Recently, he has completed Tsingtao Overture, which awarded China National Arts Fund; Beijing Rhyme - A Symphonic Suite, commissioned by the Beijing Symphony Orchestra, a quartet co-commissioned by the Wigmore Hall and Lincoln Center, and his first piano concerto Postures co-commissioned by the BBC Proms and Singapore Symphony. In 2013, Zhou Long has composed a whole evening symphonic epic 'Nine Odes' on poems by Qu Yaun for four solo vocalists and orchestra, commissioned by the Beijing Music Festival. Zhou’s music of all genres has been widely performed and recorded, and published by the Oxford University Press and the Shanghai Music Publishing House.