Jennifer Combs

Jennifer Combs was born in New Orleans, La., and is the cellist of the Anweiler-Combs Duo (piano and cello), resident musicians of the Charter Oak Concerts in Hartford, Conn. Since 1998 she has been artistic director and founder of Music Mountain’s Chamber Music Festival for Young Musicians and the Adult Amateur Chamber Retreat in Falls Village, Conn. Combs has performed at festivals and venues including the Garth Newel Music Center, Skaneateles Chamber Music Festival, Bang on a Can series at Alice Tully Hall (as a guest artist with the Cassatt Quartet), and Eastern Chamber Players, and has collaborated with violinists Miriam Fried and Franco Gulli and pianist Charles Rosen. She is the recipient of the Eastern Music Festival’s highest honor, the Bloomfield Award. Combs also performs as a soloist with orchestras such as the Connecticut Virtuosi Chamber Orchestra. A frequent guest artist of the Chicago Chamber Musicians, she appeared in a live broadcast in 2004 on Chicago's WFMT radio. Between 1992 and 1994 Combs brought a variety of chamber music programs to Hartford Public Schools through Bushnell Memorial Partners Program. She attended Juilliard Pre-College where she studied cello with Leonard Rose and Channing Robbins, received her. BM from Juilliard where she studied with Scott Ballantyne and Ardyth Alton, and earned her MM degree from Northern Illinois University where she studied with Marc Johnson of the Vermeer Quartet. She has also studied Andean music with Donald J. Funes and her chamber-music coaches include Felix Galamir, Lewis Kaplan, Scott Ballantyne, and Samuel Rhodes. She has been on the Juilliard Pre-College faculty since 2005.