Jenna Sherry, Artistic Director

From New Orleans, violinist Jenna Sherry is currently based in London. A versatile chamber musician who also specializes in historical performance, Jenna has collaborated with cellist Steven Isserlis, pianist Danny Driver, composers Unsuk Chin and Julian Anderson, and performed at venues including the Kennedy Center, Barbican Hall, and in the Aldeburgh Festival, the Warsaw Autumn Festival, and the Salzburg Chamber Music Festival.

Jenna has recorded Unsuk Chin’s Double Bind? for solo violin and electronics for BBC broadcast, collaborating with the composer and the work’s original creators at IRCAM and most recently performing the piece with the Experimental Studio des SWR in Cologne’s Acht Brücken Festival.

In 2020, with pianist Dániel Lőwenberg, she released a recording of sonatas by Dohnányi and Brahms with BMC Records (Budapest).

Jenna is the violinist/violist of EnsembleExperimental (ensemble of the SWR ExperimentalStudio in Freiburg), and regularly plays with groups such as the Irish Chamber Orchestra, Spira Mirabilis, and John Eliot Gardiner’s Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique.

She has participated in chamber music festivals around the world, including the Geelvinck Fortepiano Festival (NL), Taos Chamber Music School and Festival (USA), and the International Musicians Seminar Prussia Cove (UK) where she regularly attends the invitation-only Open Chamber Music sessions.

Selected as Marshall Scholar by the British government in 2008, Jenna received a Masters in Performance with David Takeno at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. She previously received her Bachelors of Music and French from Indiana University where she studied with Mark Kaplan as a Herman B. Wells Scholar. While growing up in New Orleans, her formative teachers were Mary Anne Fairlie and Valerie Poullette. More recent inspiration has come from work with Ferenc Rados, András Keller, and Pavlo Beznosiuk.

In 2017, Jenna joined the faculty of the Royal Conservatory in The Hague’s School for Young Talent. Jenna previously taught at the Yehudi Menuhin School (UK), a specialist music school for students between 8–18 years old.

Jenna co-founded the Birdfoot Festival in 2011 and serves as its Artistic Director.