A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, violinist Jennifer Carsillo was introduced to the violin through the public school system, and her passion for music led her to the Oberlin Conservatory as a student of Marilyn McDonald.  After winning the Oberlin Concerto Competition, Ms. Carsillo continued her education as a fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center and under the tutelage of the legendary pedagogues Franco Gulli and Josef Gingold at Indiana University, earning her Master’s Degree in violin performance.

Ms. Carsillo’s versatility and wide-ranging musical interests have shaped a diverse career spanning the gamut of styles from the Baroque to contemporary popular idioms. She has appeared as a soloist with orchestras in California, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio, Texas, Virginia, Austria, Jamaica and Russia, and will debut this season with Ansieme per Musica in Castelleone, Italy, The Coastal Symphony of Georgia on St. Simons Island and the Shreveport Symphony Orchestra.  Jennifer Carsillo also maintains an active schedule as a recitalist and chamber musician.  This season will include return engagements to Cremona, Italy, Boulder, Colorado, and Jacksonville, Florida, as well as new programs with The Evageline Trio, a piano trio celebrating its thirteenth year, which  Ms. Carsillo joined in 2006.

Since 2001, Ms. Carsillo has been the violinist for the Ava (Audio-Visual-Arts) Ensemble, a chamber music group devoted to exploring the connections between music and other forms of art.  Also an advocate for new music, Ms. Carsillo is a founding member of Rhythmic Salt, a string quartet and percussion group that debuted in October of 2003, introducing premieres by Iranian and Lebanese composers, works by Luciano Berio, Steve Reich and Peter Sculthorpe, and the concert premiere of a piece from a recent NBC movie score. 

In 2002, Ms. Carsillo was in residence as the violinist for the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, performing and recording seven world premieres written for the group, together with the standard works of living composers.  She was also a featured artist at the Prince Albert Chamber Music Festival in Hawaii, and in 2003, traveled to France and Italy to perform a series of violin and harp duo recitals with Parisian harpist Isabelle Perrin for the Chateau de Montcaud and the Maestro Foundation Cremona.  The success of these recitals led to a new collaborative project: a concerto for harp and violin by the French master composer, Jean-Michel Damase, which was revised expressly for the duo and will be debuted in October 2007 in both Italy and the United States.  She has also performed with the Ritz Chamber Players and was featured with the band Metro Area at Miami Beach’s Winter Music Conference—the dance music industry’s signature annual event.

Ms. Carsillo spent three seasons at the Wintergreen Music Festival, where she performed as a soloist, chamber musician, and Concertmaster of the Festival Orchestra.  She also enjoyed three summers as a Faculty Artist at the Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music in New Hampshire, performing and coaching for Apple Hill's "Playing for Peace" project, a program designed to bring musicians from different countries together—in friendship, as well as in music.