Performances & Press

A graduate of The Juilliard School, winner of the prestigious Morse Fellowship, and Texas State Musician, Nicole Cherry has built nearly 30 years of professional music-making in Texas — now based at the University of Texas at San Antonio — and has performed under legendary conductors Pierre Boulez, Leonard Slatkin, David Zinman, and Mstislav Rostropovich, serving as concertmaster under Rostropovich at the Kennedy Center. She has shared the stage with Whitney Houston, Ray Charles, the Juilliard String Quartet, and Yo-Yo Ma, and appeared as soloist before Queen Noor at Jordan's Royal Cultural Center, and at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Cairo Opera House, and concert stages across four continents.

The Washington Post called a Cherry performance "one of the most compelling events" of the Reston Prelude Festival. Her artistry has drawn further acclaim from Southern Living Magazine and Trinity Hall, University of Cambridge, and her recording of Joseph Bologne's Sonata No. 1 for Two Violins with ROCO, Houston's Chamber Orchestra was broadcast nationally on American Public Media's Performance Today. As a member of the Marian Anderson String Quartet — recipient of Chamber Music America's Guarneri String Quartet Residency Award and recognition from the Congress of Racial Equality — she has performed at Lincoln Center, Strathmore, the Smithsonian Institution, and Ravinia.

A 2027 Visiting Fellow of Trinity Hall at the University of Cambridge, Fulbright Adjudicator, and ARC Principal Investigator, Nicole performed in the Gateways Music Festival Orchestra's landmark Carnegie Hall debut alongside Grammy Award-winning musician Jon Batiste — and with a national tour and a London recording session on the horizon, her place among the most decorated artist-scholars of her generation has never been more certain.