musician
Audrey Wozniak is a violinist and ethnomusicologist dedicated to 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. Although trained in Western classical music, after years of immersion with musical masters in Turkey, China, and Indonesia, she has emerged as a genre-defying performer of diverse styles and traditions from around the world.
Audrey is passionate about new music and unconventional spaces. She 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. 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 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. She has established a reputation as an accomplished Turkish classical music violinist, developing a passionate social media following for the musical and cultural content she shares. She is a frequent guest on Turkish National Television and Radio programs. 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. 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 is a founding member of Raks Ensemble, a group inspired by Anatolian musical traditions, which will release their first album with the label Kalan Müzik in 2024.
Audrey is an accomplished academic who actively incorporates music performance into her research. She holds a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology from Harvard University. She graduated from Wellesley College with Honors in Music and received a Master's in Violin Performance with Distinction from Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance as well as a Master's in Politics and Communication from the London School of Economics. She plays a violin passed down from her great-grandfather Clifford and a viola generously on loan from former violist of the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich Ahmet Ediz.
