Thanks to a grant from the Princess Christina Competition, Cynthia Liem ended up in the junior class of the Rotterdam Conservatory with Michael Davidson. After this, she followed the main subject piano training at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, where she obtained her bachelor's degree with Rian de Waal, and her master's degree with Paul Komen and Han-Louis Meijer, with specializations in solo playing and chamber music. She was laureate at various competitions and attended master classes with various pianists, including Daniël Wayenberg, Willem Brons, Tamara Poddubnaya, Elena Richter, Håkon Austbø, Anton Kuerti, Charles Rosen, Malcolm Martineau, and Leslie Howard.
With Emmy Storms (violin) she forms the Magma Duo on a fixed basis, with which she won the NTR prize at the National Violin Competition Oskar Back, was laureate of the Dutch Classical Talent Tour & Award 2014-2015, the First Prize and various special prizes won at the international competition 'A Feast of Duos' 2014 in Sion, Switzerland, and released a debut CD with Globe Records in the summer of 2016.
In addition, Cynthia has a special interest in vocal accompaniment, as a result of which she likes to collaborate with various singers and chamber musicians in opera and song repertoire. Because of this interest, she also started singing on a semi-professional level, among others in the Dutch Student Chamber Choir and in the Flemish-Dutch project choir Capella di Voce, with which she can be heard as a member of the choir and quartet in a CD recording with work by Paul Schollaert used to be.
Parallel to her music studies, Cynthia studied Technical Informatics at TU Delft. As a result, she became interested in the accessibility and accessibility of digital music, and in particular, she started working for sources that do not trivially attract the attention of many users. After a promotion in 2015, she is now an Assistant Professor at TU Delft and collaborates in her research in a national and international context with partners such as the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek and Muziekweb.