Nancy Zhou, violin

Lauded as one of today's probing musical voices, Chinese-American violinist Nancy Zhou is the winner of the 2018 Shanghai Isaac Stern Violin Competition. With a robust online presence that seeks to invigorate appreciation for the art and science of the violin, her thoughtful musicianship resonates with a global audience in such a way that brings her on stage with the leading orchestras around the world.

Making her orchestral debut at the age of 13 with her hometown orchestra, the San Antonio Symphony, the violinist went on to collaborate with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, Finnish Radio Symphony, St. Petersburg Philharmonic, Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra, Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, Kansas City Symphony, Naples Philharmonic, San Diego Symphony, Padua Chamber Orchestra, among others. She has collaborated with conductors such as Jaap van Zweden, Sakari Oramo, Hannu Lintu, Xian Zhang, Eun Sun Kim, Peter Oundjian, Christoph Poppen, Jean-Jacques Kantorow, Michael Stern, and Darrell Ang.

Alongside undertaking projects as a soloist, Nancy holds interest in chamber music and in providing guidance to young musicians. As a collaborator, she has performed at the Tanglewood Music Festival, Verbier Festival, Ravinia Festival, Bronisław Huberman Festival, Tongyeong Music Festival, Festpiele Mecklenburg- Vorpormmern, Festival de Coimbra, and the Marvão Festival, and the Paganini Genova Festival. In 2017, she was invited by the Encore Chamber Music Festival to serve as guest artist and faculty member. She is a regular guest educator in Taiwan, holding masterclasses at various institutions and conducting private classes. Since the spring of 2020, the violinist devotes time to a private online studio, teaching a number of students across the globe and presenting public group classes on fundamental training and cultivating mindful awareness critical to performance. Since the fall of 2023, she has been Professor of Violin at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

Nancy regularly champions works outside the conventional oeuvre, a gesture which both underscores her personal heritage and strives for global peace-keeping. The past season, she gave the New York, Chicago, and Toronto premieres of Unsuk Chin’s “Gran Cadenza” for Two Violins with violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter at Carnegie Hall, Chicago Symphony Hall, and the Roy Thomson Hall, respectively. Nancy also performed Chinese composer Zhao Jiping’s first violin concerto with the New Jersey Symphony and conductor Xian Zhang at the Lincoln Center. In the upcoming season, she will perform Chen Qigang’s “La joie de la soufferance” with the Rogue Valley Symphony. In a parallel and deeply personal endeavor, she and composer Vivian Fung will embark on a research trip to Guizhou, China, in efforts to explore the intersection of music, dance and culture through a confluence of the violinist’s identity as a musician and her mother’s identity as a folk dancer. The result will be a work for solo violin and electronics, to be premiered in a recital tour in the season of 2025-26.

Other notable projects include a 5-city tour in China— the violinist will make her debuts with the Guangzhou Symphony, China Philharmonic, Kunming Nie’er Symphony Orchestra, Inner Mongolia Art Theater Symphony, and return for a performance with the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra. Other projects include concerto collaborations with the La Jolla Symphony, New Jersey Symphony, and Santa Cruz Symphony, where she is Artist-in-Residence.

Born in the US to Chinese immigrant parents, Nancy began the violin at age four under the guidance of her father. She went on to study with Miriam Fried at the New England Conservatory while pursuing her interest in literature and subsequently earning a Bachelor’s of Arts at Harvard University. She is also an Associated Artist of the Queen Elisabeth Chapel, where she studied with Augustin Dumay.

For more information, please visit: nancyzhouviolin.com

Management: Earl Blackburn, Kanzen Arts LLC.