Yvonne Lam
About Yvonne
Grammy-winning violinist Yvonne Lam enjoys challenging, delighting, and disarming audiences worldwide with her thoughtful musicianship, technical prowess, and fearless performance aesthetic.
As a co-artistic director of Eighth Blackbird for eight years, Lam performed around 50 concerts a year internationally; she has performed with the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Melbourne Symphony, the Kansas City Symphony, the Cincinnati Symphony, the Lexington Philharmonic, the New World Symphony, and the Tasmanian Symphony. She has recorded three albums with Eighth Blackbird, including the Grammy-winning album Filament. In 2017, she co-founded the Blackbird Creative Lab, an intensive tuition-free training program for performers and composers in Ojai, California.
Lam served three seasons as Assistant Concertmaster of the Washington National Opera Orchestra and as Associate Concertmaster of the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra. She has also appeared as soloist with such renowned orchestras as the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and the Auckland Philharmonia. Winner of the silver medal at the 2005 Michael Hill World Violin Competition, Yvonne has also garnered top prizes at the Liana Issakadze International Competition and the Holland-America Music Society Competition.
Lam is deeply committed to and inspired by artistic collaboration. An avid chamber musician, she toured the east coast with Musicians From Marlboro, collaborated with her orchestra colleagues regularly, and toured with musica aperta in Puerto Rico. She has performed at Marlboro Music Festival, Music From Angel Fire, Ravinia Music Festival, Twickenham Fest, Taos Music Festival, and Yellow Barn Music Festival.
A native of Los Angeles, Lam earned her Bachelor of Music from the Curtis Institute of Music, and her Master of Music from the Juilliard School, where she studied with Robert Mann. Yvonne has lived in every major city on the east coast except Boston, and spent eight years in Chicago. She now lives with her husband and two sons in East Lansing, where she is an Assistant Professor of Violin Performance at Michigan State University.