About Clare

Clare Monfredo is a New York City-based cellist and scholar of performance practice. Across fields, her work is motivated by the same underlying question: how are individual voices expressed across art forms? This question guides her approach to performance, research, curation, and teaching.

As a cellist, Clare has performed stylistically wide-ranging music across the United States and Europe, including with Ensemble Intercontemporain, A Far Cry, Lucerne Contemporary Orchestra, International Contemporary Ensemble, Heartbeat Opera, and Wet Ink Ensemble; alongside jazz musicians including Ron Carter and Jon Batiste; and in collaboration with artists including Nene Humphrey and Miya Masaoka. She has performed at an array of New York City venues—from Carnegie Hall to Little Island—and across Europe, including in the Paris Philharmonie, Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, Brussels’ Bozar, Leipzig Gewandhaus, and KKL Luzern. Clare’s festival appearances include Tanglewood Music Center, Music Academy of the West, Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, Aldeburgh Festival (UK), Lucerne Festival (CHE), Piatigorsky International Cello Festival, Chamber Music Northwest, and Kurt Weill Fest (DE). Her primary mentors include Norman Fischer, Peter Bruns, David Gebor, Julia Lichten, and Natasha Brofsky, as well as masterclasses with Yo-Yo Ma, Jean-Guihen Queyras, and Paolo Pandolfo.

Clare received a Doctor of Musical Arts with distinction from the City University of New York Graduate Center, where she was the recipient of the Dissertation Fellowship, Provost's Fellowship, and 5 Year Graduate Center Fellowship. Prior to living in New York she studied in Leipzig, Germany on a Fulbright Scholarship with cellist Peter Bruns, and holds a Bachelor of Arts in English from Yale University, as well as a Master of Music degree from the Shepherd School at Rice University where she studied with Norman Fischer. Her work has been featured in Strad Magazine and Strings Magazine, and her scholarship has been accepted at local and international conferences on music theory, music performance, and timbre studies.

Clare currently teaches cello at Hunter College in New York and teaches music and critical writing privately. A dedicated chamber musician, Clare is a member of the New York-based chamber group Sonora Collective and is co-founder and co-artistic director of DownEast New Music, Maine's first chamber music ensemble focused exclusively on contemporary music.