NCE Musicians

Present and Past

Karen Cueva (violin)

Violinist Karen Cueva is in her fourth year of undergraduate training at The Juilliard School where she studies with Lewis Kaplan. She is a graduate of the Walnut Hill School for the Arts and the New England Conservatory Preparatory School. She has performed on the stages of Carnegie Hall, Avery Fischer Hall, Alice Tully Hall, The Kennedy Center, and Jordan Hall, under the batons of Alan Gilbert, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Lorin Maazel, James DePriest, and Benjamin Zander. She has studied privately with renowned violinists such as Stephen Clapp, James Buswell, Linda Schroeder, and Leonid Sushansky.

Ms. Cueva began her violin studies at the age of four and has won various competitions and awards, including a Certificate of Commendation from the U.S. Marine Corps for her musical service to the veterans of the Armed Forces. She was the 2009 recipient of The Jack Kent Cooke Young Artist Award, one of the largest and most competitive scholarship programs in the nation. Ms. Cueva has attended prestigious summer festivals such as the National Symphony Orchestra Summer Music Institute, The Castleton Festival, and the Bowdoin International Music Festival.

An advocate for arts education in public schools, Ms. Cueva was a founding performer of Boston Crew, an outreach program from NPR's From The Top radio show, where she brought classical music to children in inner-city schools. She has performed as a teaching artist for Young Artists New Jersey, Boys and Girls Club, and has taught in the Juilliard Pre-College Division program CLIMB (Combining Literacy Instruction with Musical Beginnings). As the recipient of the 2010 Goldman Fellowship, she taught violin and chamber music at the Harlem School of the Arts and will return to teach there as a recipient of the 2012 Arts Enrichment Fellowship. She is currently on faculty at Opportunity Music Project, a non-profit organization that gives underserved children free violin lessons.

After her graduation from Juilliard, Ms. Cueva plans to continue her graduate studies while cultivating her passion for teaching.

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