Jessie Montgomery

Jessie Montgomery photo by Jiyang Chen. Used with permission.

American Violinist, Composer and Educator • Born 1981 • Contemporary Classical

Fast Facts

• Jessie Montgomery was born in 1981, and raised in Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
• Montgomery was born into an artistic family: her father a white jazz musician and her mother a black actress and playwright.  
• Montgomery cites her early violin teacher Alice Kanack as sparking her creativity through improvisation games; she began composing at the age of 11
• Holds degrees from the Juilliard School (violin performance) and New York University (composition).
• According to the New York Times, the number of times Montgomery’s works were programmed doubled each year from 2017 to 2020.
• Her works have been performed by many prominent orchestras, including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, the Minnesota Orchestra and the Sphinx Organization.
• In 2010 Montgomery co-founded the string ensemble PUBLIQuartet, and she performed with the Catalyst quartet until 2021.
• In 2021, Montgomery became the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Mead Composer-in-Residence.

“Music is my connection to the world. It guides me to understand my place in relation to others and challenges me to make clear the things that I don’t understand.”   – Jessie Montgomery 

“My privilege [to be able to compose and make art] comes from my parents having fought through the civil rights movement…[my] mom was very active, actually, and she was in many of the protests, and my dad, just being a rogue artist, that’s an act of protest in itself – but it’s just this idea that I came from that period, the political changes that happened during that time, so that’s what it means to me, to be an American.”  – Jessie Montgomery

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