Gong Linna was born 1975 in Guiyang, Guizhou province (located in the Southwest of China). She first appeared on stage at the age of five. Since her early childhood she knew that she wanted to become a professional singer. At 16 she began her studies at the Chinese Conservatory of Music where she held her first and highly acclaimed concert as soloist in 1999. Since that she has been a soloist with the Zhongyang Minzu Yuetuan, China’s most renowned traditional music orchestra. In addition to many other awards, she won the Chinese National Singing Competition in 2000 as best female singer, including the Special Audience Award, gaining the audience votes of over a million Chinese television viewers.

In 2001 Linna's first solo-album "Kongque fei lai" was published, presenting recordings from the previous 5 years. One year later she met composer and producer Lao Luo, who had already established himself as one of the masterminds of New Chinese Art Music, and collaborating with him she started a new artistic life. Experiments with world-music-fusion and avant-garde music as well as ethno-musical fieldwork marked the next years. In 2003 Linna contributed to the album of "Wu Xing", published on CRC. On this album Linna gave her debut as song-writer with beautiful lyrics. Her next album "Zou Shengming de Lu", published 2005 by KUKU-Music, finally set a landmark in Chinese Art Music. Since 2006 Gong Linna is performing with a stunning chamber music ensemble formed by some of China 's best instrumentalists and has been performing on many international festivals and prestigious concert halls.

Besides her work on new creations with her unique mix of traditional singing techniques and modern sounds, Gong Linna devoted lot of her time to do research on Chinese classical music and folk songs. Whilst in China most other approaches to transform folk songs into an art-form had to fail due to their lack of preserving essential essence of the songs, Linna managed to convince not only scholars but also people from diverse regions she was singing folk songs from. Her album “Zou Xikou” (in Europe published as “Chinese Folk Songs”) is a milestone and has sustainable influenced the Chinese singing (-teaching) scene. Following this her project with performance and recordings of qin-songs formed the next shock-wave in the Chinese art-music and singing scene.

Still and quite in contrast to her impact on Chinese culture Gong Linna continues to be a "secret star". The Chinese music scene does not give her much chances for performance, as ambitious art-music does yet hardly have a stage in China. And "the West" also still is full of preconceptions about Chinese singing making it difficult to program concerts with Chinese music. All this does not bother Gong Linna much - she is working on her next project, the recordings of art-songs written by Song dynasty poet-composer JIANG Kui and by 20th century composer LUO Zhongrong.