Melissa White

Violinist Melissa White has enchanted audiences and critics around the world as both a soloist and a chamber musician. Her recent orchestral activity includes return engagements with the National Philharmonic; the Lansing Symphony Orchestra and the Chicago Sinfonietta; and debuts with the Richmond, Baton Rouge, Monroe, Pasadena, Knox-Galesburg and Johnson City symphony orchestras. In March 2021 she makes her debut with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, and in April 2021 with the Albany (NY) Symphony Orchestra, where she will perform George Tsontakis’s Violin Concerto No. 2 and premiere a new work for violin and orchestra by Tanner Porter.

A first-prize laureate in the Sphinx Competition, Ms. White has performed with such leading U.S. ensembles as the Cleveland Orchestra; the Boston Pops; the Louisville Orchestra; and the Atlanta, Baltimore, Colorado, Detroit and Pittsburgh symphony orchestras; as well as with Poland’s Fillharmonia Dolnoslaska and with the Colombian Youth Orchestra on a tour of that country. Her film credits include a violin solo in the soundtrack to Jordan Peele’s 2019 psychological thriller Us.

Ms. White is a founding member of New York-based Harlem Quartet, with which she has performed and engaged in educational activities throughout the U.S., as well as in Europe, Africa, Japan and the United Kingdom, since the quartet’s inception in 2006.

In fall 2020 Ms. White joined the Music Artist Faculty at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development.

A native of Michigan, she holds performance degrees from the Curtis Institute of Music and New England Conservatory, where her teachers included Jaime Laredo, Ida Kavafian, Donald Weilerstein and Miriam Fried. Her current instrument, “Matilda,” was commissioned as part of a Sphinx MPower Artist Grant in 2014 by the American violin maker Ryan Soltis.

Melissa White is represented worldwide by New York-based Sciolino Artist Management.