Gwen Krosnick
Full Biography

Cellist Gwen Krosnick has appeared across the world as recitalist, chamber musician, and joyous advocate for music. Her career spans devoted quartet and trio playing, solo cello recitals, teaching at major universities and chamber music festivals, writing on music, and countless premieres and performances of contemporary music. Krosnick is known for her ecstatic and luminous voice; for her deep, burnished palette of sounds at the cello; and for a fierce technique that etches her gestures, colors, and bass lines with arresting conviction.

Highlights of Krosnick’s upcoming seasons include solo cello recitals across New York, New England, and the Midwest; performing a trove of treasured standard-repertory chamber music, from Beethoven’s “Archduke” and Schubert B-flat trios to quintets by Brahms, Shostakovich, and Mozart; carrying string quartets such as the Mozart “Hunt,” Dorothy Rudd Moore’s Modes, and Shostakovich’s String Quartet no. 14, Op. 142, in F-sharp major, which centers the unique virtuosity and multi-layered voice of the cello; and premieres of new works by Joan Tower, Victoria Bond, and Christian Wolff. She will collaborate with a range of wonderful colleagues, such as violinists Ari Isaacman-Beck, and David Bowlin; violists Anna Griffis and Brian Hong; jazz singer Dominique Eade; guitarist Eliot Fisk; and pianists Jane Coop, Emely Phelps, Gilles Vonsattel, Magdalena Baczewska, and Ursula Oppens. She continues her serious piano trio collaboration with her beloved Kneisel Hall colleagues – Laurie Smukler, violinist, and Qing Jiang, pianist, with whom Krosnick has performed since 2021 – focusing next on works of Shostakovich and Weinberg, to be presented in Maine and New York as well as recorded.

Since 2022, Gwen Krosnick has been the cellist of the Cassatt String Quartet, with which group she specializes both in joyful reimaginings of standard quartet repertoire and in a vast range of contemporary music – with particular emphasis on the music of women and other composers whose backgrounds have been underrepresented on classical music stages. Alongside her quartet colleagues – violinists Muneko Otani and Jennifer Leshnower and violist Emily Brandenburg – Krosnick’s next projects include playing and teaching at the Seal Bay Festival of American Chamber Music in Midcoast Maine; twice-annual community residencies in West Texas, at Cassatt in the Basin; performances across the United States, including annual concerts at Music Mountain and Treetops Chamber Music Society, as well as numbers of appearances in the Quartet’s home base of New York City; an Italian concert tour in spring of 2025; and, as artists on the roster of the New York State Council on the Arts, playing dozens of concerts at schools, assisted living residences, and other community venues around New York State.

Krosnick has spent recent seasons with the quartet sharing teaching residencies at Columbia University, Bennington College, The Hartt School, Bard Conservatory, College of the Holy Cross, and SUNY Purchase; playing programs centering the music of American women; and working extensively with living composers – among them Joan Tower, Victoria Bond, James Lee III, Chen Yi, Adolphus Hailstork, Zhou Long, and Tania León. As part of the Cassatt Quartet’s upcoming 40th-anniversary celebration, the CSQ will premiere and champion new works by major American women composers, including Victoria Bond – who is writing the group a new piano quintet – and Joan Tower, whose new string quartet the Cassatts will premiere in 2025.

Krosnick has herself been a passionate performer of new music for more than twenty years; she gave her first solo premieres, of works written for her by Ralph Shapey and Richard Wernick, on her senior recital in high school. In the decades since, she has focused on the music of American composers with a marvelous and diverse range of voices: among them Shapey and Wernick, as well as Shulamit Ran and Donald Martino, Lei Liang, Elliott Carter, Kermit Moore, Jeffrey Mumford, Charles Wuorinen, Roger Sessions, Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, and Dorothy Rudd Moore. Krosnick’s upcoming solo cello recitals in 2024-2025 – with a program of music by Tania León, Ralph Shapey, Donald Martino, Dorothy Rudd Moore, and James Lee III – will form the basis for her first unaccompanied-cello recording project.

In her early career, Krosnick was the cellist of Trio Cleonice, with which group she performed across the United States, Europe, and Asia from 2008 to 2016. With violinist Ari Isaacman-Beck and pianist Emely Phelps, Krosnick founded the trio at Kneisel Hall, and went on to play major debuts at Jordan Hall, the Kennedy Center, and the Concertgebouw. The group was Graduate Piano Trio-in-Residence at the New England Conservatory from 2011 to 2014, and began an acclaimed community chamber music series, Trio Cleonice & Friends, which presented monthly programs – from Bach and Dvořák to Bartók, Wernick, Shapey, and Widmann – to a devoted, enthusiastic audience. From 2016 to 2020, Krosnick presented the Boston Beethoven Cycle at Pucker Gallery; curated alongside Isaacman-Beck, the series was a chronological journey of the complete Beethoven string quartets, with contemporary works interspersed.

Gwen Krosnick is a double-degree graduate of Oberlin College and Conservatory, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Russian Language and Literature alongside her cello studies; her Master of Music degree, with Honors, is from New England Conservatory. Her teachers included Natasha Brofsky, Vivian Weilerstein, and Donald Weilerstein at NEC; Darrett Adkins, Tom Newlin, and Brian Alegant at Oberlin; Geoff Nuttall at Stanford and Banff; and Joel Krosnick, Laurie Smukler, and Seymour Lipkin at Kneisel Hall. Krosnick’s continuing education has included training in Myofascial Release, whose benefits for musicians she has taught in workshops online and in person; as well as a 50-hour course in teaching Yoga Nidra meditation, Reiki I certification, and a 200-hour Yoga Teacher Training. Since 2021, Krosnick has studied writing with Abigail Rasminsky, exploring poetry and short-form creative non-fiction weekly alongside other brilliant women writers. Krosnick’s writing on music has appeared in magazines such as Strings and Strad; in program notes for her own series, and for the Cassatt Quartet’s and Trio Cleonice’s concerts; and in programs for chamber music series around the U.S. Krosnick’s personal essays, program notes, and music writing appear on her website.

Gwen Krosnick is a dedicated teacher, passionate about helping her students deepen their voices and find technical solutions that are shaped by the music they explore. Krosnick has served on the faculties of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Vivace Cello Festival, New England Conservatory Preparatory Division, the New York Youth Symphony Chamber Music Program, and Junior Greenwood; she has given masterclasses at institutions such as Eastman, Bard, Oberlin, Hartt, College of the Holy Cross, West Chester University of Pennsylvania, Vivace Festival, the Cleveland Institute of Music, SUNY Potsdam, and Duke. In Fall 2024, she joins the faculty of Columbia University’s Music Performance Program; she will spend the Spring 2025 semester as Visiting Professor of Cello at Oberlin Conservatory, filling in for Darrett Adkins during his sabbatical. During the summers, Krosnick teaches at Kneisel Hall, of which she is a longtime alumna, and where she has served as Artist-Faculty since 2019.

Gwen Krosnick grew up with a mother who was an upper-grade elementary school teacher in the New York City Public Schools, a father who was cellist of the Juilliard Quartet, a younger brother, and six Australian Shepherd dogs. Her brother, Josh, is a New York-based hip-hop artist and producer; and her parents have two more Aussies. Krosnick herself now lives in the woods distantly outside New York City with her own dog. Away from the cello, she is a famously accomplished home cook, with particular interest in classic Italian cooking, homemade kimchis and other Korean banchan, and granola-inflected vegetarian hippie food. Krosnick is an insatiable reader – with taste ranging from contemporary literary fiction by women of color to 19th-century Russian epics to romantic comedies, thrillers, and love poetry – and a writer, both of work focused on music and of creative non-fiction. She is working on a novel. Perhaps most importantly, Krosnick is Mom to Anya, her black tri-color Australian Shepherd rescue dog, who keeps her company during all the reading, writing, practicing, cooking, and quartet rehearsing.