BIO

Nick Kendall is one of the most versatile violinists and violists of his generation — called "a poster child for a new breed of super-musicians" by The Washington Post, a Grammy and Emmy Award-winning performer whose work moves without apology between the concert hall, the recording studio, film scoring, and pop production. The New York Times has described his ensemble Time for Three as playing with "suavity and fevered focus," and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette as "chamber musicians who turn a concert into a show." Nick is driven by a conviction that playing music should feel like what it felt like at the beginning — a release of energy, a way of shaping creativity, a reason to practise discipline — and that the job of a performer is to make that feeling spread through the room until everyone in it is part of the moment.

As a founding member of Time for Three, Nick has helped build one of the most distinctive ensembles in American music, a string trio of two violins and double bass, who sing as they play and move between classical, bluegrass, jazz, and pop. Their recording Letters for the Future with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Xian Zhang (Deutsche Grammophon) won the 2023 Grammy for Best Classical Instrumental Solo, with Kevin Puts's Contact taking Best Contemporary Classical Composition on the same album. In January 2026, Platoon released Emily — No Prisoner Be, Puts's 24-part song cycle on the poetry of Emily Dickinson, written for Time for Three and mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato and co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall, Bregenzer Festspiele, and Cal Performances. The New York Times called the trio "the engine of Emily's creativity.” The work premiered in Bregenz and has since toured to Carnegie Hall, Zellerbach Hall, Chicago's Symphony Center, Oslo Opera House, Grafenegg, and the Ruhrtriennale, with further tours booked for upcoming seasons.

In 2021, Time for Three wrote and performed the score for psychological drama film Land, Robin Wright's directorial debut, which premiered at Sundance and was distributed by Focus Features. The trio's reach runs from NPR's Tiny Desk to a Christmas Day appearance on ABC's Good Morning America in 2025, to China Central Television’s globally broadcast Mid-Autumn Festival Gala, by way of a 2023 JammJam bill alongside Big Freedia and Tank and the Bangas. Beyond the trio, Nick toured South America as guest leader of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields with Joshua Bell, co-founded the East Coast Chamber Orchestra, and has shared the stage with Branford Marsalis, Lau Noah, Ahmed Alom, Chris Thile, Alisa Weilerstein, Christoph Eschenbach, Marin Alsop, and Michael Tilson Thomas. Chris Brubeck wrote a jazz-inspired improvised violin concerto for him.

Nick’s work outside classical music includes Summer Walker's Still Over It (Interscope, 2021), ongoing collaborations with Michael Thurber, appearances with Simple Minds, and a featured residency on the touring super show Night of the Proms. Across all of it, he has played the BBC Proms, the Hollywood Bowl, Sydney Opera House, the Wiener Musikverein, the Elbphilharmonie, and the Shanghai Symphony Hall.

For three seasons through the Covid-19 pandemic, Nick held an Artistic Residency at Lincoln Center, a run of spirited, genreless collaborations, built to provoke, inspire, delight, and uplift. His residency series Continuum brought more than twenty artists into improvised settings across the Lincoln Center’s campus, from the porte cochère beneath the plaza's grand stair to the three-storey glass atrium of Alice Tully Hall, with Broadway traffic as the backdrop. Steve Hackman with musicians from the New York Philharmonic, Michael Thurber, Becca Stevens, Louis Cato, Danielle Ponder - in Nick’s own words, these events created "emotional and personal connections between artists and audience, a shared path of musical discovery." Since 2023 Nick has curated and hosted Carnegie Hall's Fall Celebrations for The Notables, the hall's program for the next generation of philanthropic leaders, reimagining the legendary historic space and the experience within it for a younger community of music lovers.

Nick's commitment to young people is the thread that runs through his life and work. His grandfather, the music pedagogue John Kendall, brought the Suzuki method from Japan to the United States in the 1960s; Nick began as a Suzuki student at the age of three and trained at the Curtis Institute of Music. Beth Purdue Outland of the Indianapolis Symphony has said of his work with young students that "they can see themselves in him, in his playfulness, in his exuberance." Nick’s programming for young concert goers Listen Up: Music is a Language! and Musical Minds (the latter developed with neuroscientist Dr. Daniel J. Levitin) have reached audiences with the Philadelphia Orchestra, the National Symphony at the Kennedy Center, and the Indianapolis Symphony, and his platform Music at Play extends that work beyond the concert hall. His closest education partnership is with the Young People's Chorus of New York City, founded by MacArthur Fellow Francisco J. Núñez and serving two thousand young singers a year from every background. What began as the inaugural event of Nick’s Lincoln Center residency, when he hosted the chorus's first live performance in sixteen months on the public art installation “The GREEN” around Lincoln Center’s iconic Revson Fountain, has grown into a continuing collaboration: a holiday program at Alice Tully Hall with Louis Cato and Danielle Ponder, and most recently a surprise appearance with the chorus at a New York Philharmonic tribute to Gustavo Dudamel and his first season as orchestra’s Music Director.

Nick plays an 1838 G. F. Pressenda violin, on loan from the Marks family.

Nick Kendall, bio Fall 2026