Austin Wulliman

Violinist, composer and educator Austin Wulliman embodies the imagined and empathizes with the absurd through sounds both familiar and radical, telling stories with a limitless passion for tuning cries from every corner of the human capacity to hear. He is a member of JACK Quartet, called “the nation’s most important quartet” by The New York Times and has been praised as a “gifted, adventuresome violinist” by the Chicago Tribune. Through in-depth collaboration with performers and composers working in a panoply of aesthetic realms, Austin searches daily for the violin’s voice in today’s musical world. His debut album as composer, The News From Utopia, was released in 2023, which Austin wrote, recorded and mixed himself.

Austin has played in such renowned venues as Wigmore Hall, the Berlin Philharmonie, the Elbphilharmonie, Carnegie Hall, and the Wiener Konzerthaus, and featured at festivals such as Tanglewood, Ojai, Spoleto, and Lucerne. His work with JACK Quartet has included premieres by John Luther Adams, Chaya Czernowin, Philip Glass, Georg Friedrich Haas, Clara Iannotta, George Lewis, Tyshawn Sorey, and John Zorn, as well as collaborating with the likes of Barbara Hannigan, Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Helmut Lachenmann, Igor Levit, Julia Wolfe, and leading a chamber orchestra of members of the Berlin Philharmonic. He has received awards from Musical America (“2019 Ensemble of the Year” JACK Quartet), Chamber Music America’s Michael Jaffee Visionary Award in 2024, and was presented with Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2019.

Equally in demand as an educator, Austin serves on faculty at the Mannes School of Music, where JACK is Quartet in Residence. He has taught violin and musicianship on faculty at the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Lucerne Festival Academy, and New Music on the Point in Vermont. Additionally, he has given guest instruction and presentations at such institutions as the Curtis Institute, The Juilliard School, New World Symphony, University of Michigan and Northwestern University.