BIOGRAPHY
Sought after for her “radiant” (The New York Times) performances full of “tremendous heart, bringing joy and a captivating sound to the stage” (The Strad), Karen Ouzounian is a GRAMMY®-nominated cellist and composer who creates music from a deeply personal place.
She has appeared as a soloist in venues including the Konzerthaus Berlin, Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, Kölner Philharmonie, Tonhalle Düsseldorf, and Carnegie Hall, championing a remarkable breadth of music with fierce commitment and emotional power. An omnivorous musical spirit who “powerfully shatters pigeonholes with her artistic partners” (Ravinia Magazine), she has premiered numerous works and collaborated with some of the most singular musicians of our time, including Yo-Yo Ma, Rhiannon Giddens, and Augustin Hadelich.
In the 2026-27 season, Ouzounian appears in recital in New York, Hamburg, Chicago, Toronto, and Los Angeles, and makes her Boston Symphony Orchestra solo debut at the 2026 Tanglewood Festival as soloist in Kayhan Kalhor’s double concerto Venus in the Mirror. As a composer, her recent commissions include works for the Silkroad Ensemble, Salt Bay Chamberfest, and the Cello Teaching Repertoire Consortium, and during her 2026 residency at Lighthouse Works, she will be writing a string quartet commissioned by the Aeolus Quartet.
At the heart of Ouzounian’s artistic practice is her love of collaboration and the development of adventurous programs. Her current focus includes a trio of projects created with her husband, composer and animator Lembit Beecher: Mayrig, Dear Mountains, and Tell Me Again. Mayrig (“mother” in Armenian) is an immersive and intimate 65-minute show in which the voices of Karen’s mother and grandmother are interwoven with original arrangements of Armenian music of her family’s ancestral home of Anatolia, songs and stories drawn from their post-genocide home of Lebanon, the music of Charles Aznavour and Marin Marais, and recent works by Beecher, Layale Chaker, Nathalie Joachim, Niloufar Nourbakhsh, and Ouzounian. In November 2024, Ouzounian premiered Dear Mountains, a 42-minute work co-composed with Beecher for solo cello, oud, percussion, and SATB chorus. Written in nine movements, it juxtaposes stories told and retold in Ouzounian’s family with scenes of music-making across the Armenian diaspora over the last 100 years, as seen through archival recordings and writings. Commissioned by Cantori New York, the Armenian Mirror-Spectator wrote of the work, “Ouzounian and Beecher have pulled off something remarkable.” Beecher’s Tell Me Again is a new cello concerto inspired by the couple’s familial histories of migration, receiving its world premiere with conductor Eric Jacobsen and the Orlando Philharmonic, and its West Coast premiere with conductor Cristian Măcelaru and the 2024 Cabrillo Festival Orchestra.
In other recent collaborations, Ouzounian gave the world premiere of Anna Clyne’s Shorthand for solo cello and strings with The Knights, which she recorded for Avie Records and toured as soloist with The Knights throughout Germany, Denmark, and the U.S. to critical acclaim. She subsequently performed Shorthand with conductor Jeffrey Kahane and the Sarasota Music Festival Orchestra and gave its Canadian premiere at the Sweetwater Music Festival. She premiered and recorded Kayhan Kalhor’s Blue as the Turquoise Night of Neyshabur, a new triple concerto for solo kamancheh, cello, tabla, and orchestra, alongside soloists Kalhor and Sandeep Das with Eric Jacobsen leading the Virginia Symphony, Orlando Philharmonic, and Greater Bridgeport Symphony. She developed, toured, and recorded Osvaldo Golijov’s Falling Out of Time; commissioned Bring Your Own Garden Party from Christina Courtin for cello/voice; gave the world premiere of Beecher’s A Year to the Day, featuring tenor Nicholas Phan and violinist Augustin Hadelich, and filmed it for The Violin Channel; appeared with orchestras including the Milwaukee Symphony and Philharmonic Orchestra of Santiago in repertoire ranging from John Adams’s Absolute Jest to the Elgar Cello Concerto; and created an evening-length video work, In Motion, an exploration of heritage and family history through interviews, original compositions, and collaborations with visual artists Kevork Mourad and Nomi Sasaki and percussionist Haruka Fujii.
Dedicated to the art of chamber music, Ouzounian was the founding cellist of the Aizuri Quartet for 11 years, during which time the ensemble was awarded major chamber music prizes on three continents, including Chamber Music America’s Cleveland Quartet Award, the Grand Prize at the M-Prize Chamber Arts Competition, the Osaka International Chamber Music Competition in Japan, and the Wigmore Hall International String Quartet Competition in London, and served as the MetLiveArts String Quartet-in-Residence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Quartet’s debut album, Blueprinting, featuring new works written for the Aizuri Quartet by five American composers, was released by New Amsterdam Records to critical acclaim (“In a word, stunning” – I Care If You Listen), named one of NPR Music’s Best Classical Albums and nominated for a GRAMMY® Award.
Since 2016, Ouzounian has been performing around the globe as a member of the Silkroad Ensemble, the group founded by Yo-Yo Ma that engages in cross-cultural collaboration and understanding. Recent tours with the Silkroad Ensemble include Sanctuary, Uplifted Voices, American Railroad, Phoenix Rising, and Kinan Azmeh and Kevork Mourad’s Home Within, and have featured Ouzounian’s works Songs of the Sap, Der Zor, and Imagined Anatolian Dance. She has appeared at the Marlboro, Ojai, Ravinia, Caramoor, and IMS Prussia Cove festivals, toured with Musicians from Marlboro, and is a member of the Brooklyn-based ensemble The Knights.
Passionate about nurturing the next generation of artists, Ouzounian has served on the faculty of the Sarasota Music Festival; has worked with cello, chamber music, and composition students at the University of Southern California, Princeton University, New York University, Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Royal Conservatory of Music and Glenn Gould School in Toronto, The Hartt School, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln; and has served as a mentor in The Juilliard School’s Mentoring Program.
Ouzounian holds Master of Music and Bachelor of Music degrees from The Juilliard School, where she was a student of Timothy Eddy, a Post-Baccalaureate Diploma from the Curtis Institute of Music, and is a recipient of the S&R Foundation’s Washington Award. Born to Lebanese-Armenian parents in Toronto, she resides in New York City with her husband, Lembit Beecher.