Ditch Productions: Sound Image Movement Assembly

Biography

Cellist Clara Kennedy, a 2005 graduate of The Juilliard School, is quickly becoming a unique voice on the New York music scene. She began playing the cello at age ten, and by age 17 she had won the concerto competition at The Longy School of Music, gone on tour to such countries at France, Venezuela and Cuba, and received full scholarship to the Boston University Tanglewood Institute. She has studied with Leslie Moye, Barbara Stein-Mallow, Eugene Kim, Darrett Adkins, Bonnie Hampton, Bernard Greenhouse, and Joel Krosnick, who was her private teacher at The Juilliard School where she graduated with a Bachelors Degree in Cello Music Performance in 2005. As an avid chamber musician, she has studied with teachers such as Earl Carlyss, Joel Smirnoff, Sir Roger Norrington and John Harbison. On full scholarship, she attended the Kneisel Hall Music Festival for two years, performing chamber music and studying with George Sopkin, Bonnie Hampton, Jerry Grossman, and Katherine Murdock. A native of Wichita, Kansas, she recently returned to perform in multiple concerts at The Chamber Music at The Barn concert series, performing in multimedia productions that paired music and film. Clara was seated principal cellist of The Juilliard Orchestra and played under famous conductors such as Otto Werner-Mueller, Marin Alsop, James DePreist, Raymond Leppard and Gerard Schwarz. She has played concerts in Alice Tully Hall, Avery Fisher Hall, Juilliard's Morse and Paul Halls, The Juilliard Theater, Jazz at Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall. Since graduation, she has been in and out of the studio recording pop-music and film scores where she recently finished recording the soundtrack for the movie, The Beauty Remains, directed by Chinese Academy Award winner Ann Hu. Performing and collaborating with artists of varied mediums from Shortbus' Scott Matthew and Justin Bond of the broadway duo Kiki and Herb to Wynton w/ Strings alongside Wynton Marasalis' Quintet, she has performed in venues such as The Bowery Ballroom, Jazz at Lincoln Center, The Bowery Poetry Club, Galapagos Art Space, St. Ann's Warehouse, and the famous Speigeltent. She is a founding member of the Contreras Piano Trio, and she has been a contributing member of the multimedia performance art collective Ditch Productions, composing and performing in multimedia productions with fellow Juilliard graduates.