Michiko Theurer

​violinist
artist
scholar

[conversation-weaver]

Photo by Phil Taylor

Michiko Theurer is passionate about building conversations between different disciplines and experiences. As a violinist, she has been Artist in Residence for the Boulder Bach Festival, served in the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble, and performed with artists from Eighth Blackbird, the Pacifica Quartet,  and Concertante. Her recording of Toru Takemitsu’s Rocking Mirror Daybreak with violinist Sarah Briggs was released on Navona Records, together with a series of paintings she created based on Takemitsu's compositional methods. She holds a DMA in violin performance from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and is currently pursuing a PhD in musicology at Stanford University. 
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As a painter, Michiko has been the Artistic Partner of the Four Seasons Chamber Music Festival since 2006. Together with composer and librettist Jenny Kallick, she created a multimedia visual companion to ARCHITECT, a chamber opera, using her original art, videography, and photography. The resulting work has been shown to critical acclaim in film festivals in Chicago, New York, and Milan, and was described in Opera News as “convincingly evocative of architectural thought and creativity in general.” She recently commissioned and premiered Circling the Waves, a musical conversation for six composers based on her paintings and inspired by Virginia Woolf's novel The Waves.

She has served on the faculty of the Colorado Chamber Orchestra Academy and presented master classes and educational events through the Boulder Bach Festival, Amherst College, and East Carolina University. Michiko graduated from Amherst College with majors in English and music and received her MM from Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music. Her violin teachers have included Harumi Rhodes, Edward Dusinberre, Mark Steinberg, Simin Ganatra, Philipp Naegele, Bayla Keyes, and Ara Gregorian. ​​​