Jessie Montgomery
Violinist, composer and music educator Jessie Montgomery began her violin studies at age four at the Third Street Music School Settlement in her native New York City. She was composing and improvising as well by age eleven, and while still in high school twice received the Composer's Apprentice Award from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. Montgomery went on to earn a bachelor's degree in violin performance at the Juilliard School and a master's from New York University in film scoring and multimedia; she also studied composition with Derek Bermel and Steven Burke. As a performer and educator, Montgomery was a co-founding member of PUBLIQuartet (an ensemble made up of composers and arrangers, featuring their own music as well as that of other New York-based composers), a member of the Catalyst Quartet and Providence String Quartet (dedicated to using music as a means of exploring possibilities for social change in underserved communities in the Providence area, where she taught violin, improvisation and composition to Community MusicWorks students), a faculty member of the Apple Hill Center in New Hampshire, Music at Port Milford in Canada, and Third Street Music School Settlement in New York, and an affiliated artist with Sphinx, an organization that supports young African-American and Latino string players, in which she was a two-time laureate; she is also currently an active participant in the New York classical and new music scenes. As a composer, Montgomery has created works for concert, theater and film (one of which was in collaboration with her father, Ed Montgomery, also a composer and an independent film producer), and held residencies with the Deer Valley Music Festival, Providence String Quartet and New York Youth Symphony; she was Van Lier Composer Fellow with the American Composers Orchestra in 2011-2012.