Karen Bentley Pollick is one of America’s leading contemporary musicians, performing a wide range of solo repertoire and styles on violin, viola, piano and hardingfele (Norwegian Hardanger fiddle) to extend the boundaries of the concert experience, from the Baroque to cutting-edge contemporary music and live improvisations.
A native of Palo Alto, California, she began piano lessons at age 5 with the Armenian pianist Rusana Sysoyev. During high school she studied violin with Camilla Wicks in San Francisco. She performed in the master-classes of Nathan Milstein, Jean-Jacques Kantorow, and Glenn Dicterow, and studied with Rostislav Dubinsky, Josef Gingold and Yuval Yaron at Indiana University, where she received both Bachelors and Masters of Music Degrees in Violin Performance with a cognate in Choral Conducting.