"Always be curious"

This is Shengyu Cao's motto as a professional musician, he wants to keep learning and interacting with more people in the world during his music career, which is the human attitude he pursues all his life. As a new generation of violist, he has been active in major festivals and various performances, and he participated in the Brahms Piano Quartet at the recent Liangchu music festival in Hangzhou, China. In early 2020, he was selected as one of the final 11 students for the Shanghai master class to be held by renowned violist Nobuko Imai. In September 2020, he was selected as a representative of Colorado State University to participate in an online master class with Juliet White-Smith, the viola professor at Ohio State University, as a kid born in Guiyang, China, he also sought to bring the music of his hometown to the world, in his undergraduate recital, he performed "Songs of the Grasslands", which let the students in school to hear the wonderful music from southwest China for the first time. 

Shengyu Cao has studied violin since he was a child, he enrolled in the School of Music at Southwestern University in September 2016 and studied violin with Professor Ke Li, who is a National First-Class Musician. In May 2018, he was selected for the Colorado State University 2+2 joint training program and passed the audition to study viola performance at Colorado State University. He started to study with Professor Miller Margaret, he was the Principal Assistant Viola of Sinfonia Chamber Orchestra at Colorado State University from 2019 to 2020 he was invited to attend a master class with Nicolas Cords, Professor of Viola at the New England Conservatory of Music, in early 2021. and was officially accepted into the Graduate School of Music at the University of Cincinnati in March 2021.