Violinist and artistic director Jenna Sherry was brought up in New Orleans, a city overflowing with live music. Its vibrance has shaped her music-making and her commitment to the relationship between performer and listener.

Recognized for her "abundant energy and great refinement" on stage, Jenna's approach to making music is rooted in the belief that live performance is a dynamic exchange. The audience's perceptive role enables each musical moment to find shape and meaning.

Her creative practice extends to include curating, directing, and other formats that place music in the rich context of human experience. Her programmes seek to engage both intellect and emotions, revealing new layers of meaning even in familiar music.

Critical and creative
This same searching nature has drawn Jenna to historically informed performance. She finds equal purpose in diving deeply into the music and its context as she does in the sounds, textures and colours of gut strings and original instruments. How did musicians of the past hear the notes and music differently? How did the context in which music was played change its performance?

Jenna has been shaped and inspired by her work with the English Baroque Soloists and Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique and her approach has led to invitations to guest-lead chamber music tours across Australia with the Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra. The press wrote: 'Despite the intricate layers, all musicians seemed to move as one, matching each other's breaths, bowing and resolving tempo changes with natural ease.' Jenna's questioning spirit stretches beyond baroque and classical repertoire, underpinning her way of understanding music of all eras.

The collaborative musician
Jenna finds energy and joy in chamber music with colleagues such as cellist Steven Isserlis, pianist Peter Frankl and countertenor Reginald Mobley. Together with pianist Dániel Lőwenberg, she released a recording of sonatas by Dohnányi and Brahms with BMC Records. Jenna's love for lively collaboration has been recognised by invitations to play in the International Musicians' Seminar Prussia Cove Open Chamber Music sessions every year since 2010.

Jenna is solo violin/viola of EnsembleExperimental, the ensemble of the SWR ExperimentalStudio in Freiburg, Germany. Recent commitments included the Warsaw Autumn Festival and TIME:SPANS Festival in New York. Jenna has worked with composer Julian Anderson and with Unsuk Chin, performing and recording her Double Bind? for solo violin and electronics, for broadcast on BBC Radio 3. The work was also presented at the Barbican's Total Immersion series and Acht Brücken Festival in Cologne.