musician
Audrey Wozniak is a violinist and violist dedicated to cultivating cross-cultural exploration and curiosity through creating experiences that invite the audience to engage with culture, sound, and space in unanticipated ways. Audrey started playing violin at the age of six after seeing internationally-renowned violinist Itzhak Perlman perform on the children’s television show Sesame Street. Since that time, she has emerged as a genre-defying performer of diverse styles and traditions from around the world, from microtonal Renaissance to Turkish classical music.
Audrey is passionate about new music and unconventional spaces, and has premiered works by architect-composer Emma-Kate Matthews at the Royal Academy of Arts in London and the Sagrada Família in Barcelona, compositions for James Turrell's Skyspace at the University of Texas at Austin, and her own solo composition at the National Portrait Gallery in London. In the spring of 2014, Audrey gave the Boston premiere of American composer Lou Harrison's rarely-played Double Concerto for Violin, Cello, and Javanese Gamelan on the composer's own instruments, especially tuned for the piece and held at Harvard University. She was appointed Artist-in-Residence at Harvard University's I Tatti Center for Renaissance Studies in 2023, where she performed and recorded music of 16th-century composer Nicola Vincentino and Turkish makam music with arciorgano, harpsichord, adjustable microtonal guitar, and viola, and premiered a new work by composer Mauricio Silva Orendain. She regularly performs and records with groups including the Grammy Award-winning Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Odyssey Opera, MIT’s Gamelan GalakTika, Ambient Orchestra, and Wellesley’s Collegium Musicum, and has taught and performed as a faculty member at Austin Chamber Music Center.
Engaging with improvisation and diverse musical cultures is an essential piece of Audrey’s music-making. As a 2014-2015 recipient of the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, Audrey explored multiculturalism in local music cultures of China, Indonesia, and Turkey. During the year she studied Chinese erhu, Balinese rebab, Uyghur ghijak, and Banyuwangi biola (stringed instruments) with local master musicians, traveled with Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble on their Asia tour, and performed on the main stage of Bali’s largest music festival.
An accomplished Turkish classical music violinist, she regularly travels to Istanbul to continue her study of Turkish classical music, where she regularly performs on Turkish National Radio live broadcasts and with renowned musicians such as Necati Çelik, Canan Sezgin Geylan, Yahya Geylan, Murat Seçkin, Ayhan Çakır, and Talat Er. She is a regular collaborator with Grammy Award-winning opera tenor Bülent Bezdüz. Between 2019-2021, Audrey served as artistic director of Harvard’s World Music Collective, an ensemble comprised of musicians committed to exploring beyond the Euro-American musical tradition through (re)arranging, composing, and performing music from diverse musical cultures. She recently performed as a singer of Turkish Black Sea folk music on musician Oktay Üst's album Aşka Düşen Divane (2022).
A graduate of Wellesley College with Honors in Music and a recipient of Masters in Violin Performance with Distinction from Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, Audrey is currently a doctoral candidate in Ethnomusicology at Harvard University. She plays a violin passed down from her great-grandfather Clifford and a viola generously on loan from Ahmet Ediz, former violist of the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich.