Lena Fankhauser | Life After Juilliard

Postcards From Juilliard Alums

While I was at Juilliard, Heidi Castleman (faculty 1995–present), my wonderful teacher, suggested I attend the Prussia Cove Seminars in Cornwall, where I met viola professor Thomas Riebl from Salzburg, and following my master’s degree, I did postgraduate studies at the Mozarteum University, and ended up spending five years playing with the Camerata Salzburg before the Vienna Volksoper called. Festivals across the world and numerous tours to Japan followed, and then I founded a chamber music festival in Bad Ischl, in the Austrian Alps, organized by my association for new chamber music, (CH)AMBER. In 2013, I joined the Koehne Quartet, specializing in contemporary music. I live in Vienna as a violist at the Burgtheater and play with the Munich and Vienna philharmonics. Having been a Sphinx prize winner at Juilliard, I served on the jury of the 2020 Sphinx competition, the epicenter of creating diversity in the arts. And I’m also a founding member of the Chineke! Orchestra, Europe’s first majority black and minority ethnic orchestra.

Lena Fankhauser (BM ’00, MM ’02, viola)