Katja Yeager

Katja Yeager is an active orchestral player, chamber musician, and dedicated teacher. She is a graduate of the Cleveland Institute of Music, where she earned both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Viola Performance as a student of Jeffrey Irvine and of Lynne Ramsey. Katja’s orchestral experience as a leader and section player includes performances with the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, Verbier Festival Orchestra, New World Symphony, Cleveland Institute of Music Orchestra, and Aspen Music Festival Conducting Academy. She has performed under distinguished conductors such as Manfred Honeck, Valery Gergiev, Lahav Shani, Matthias Pintscher, and Fabio Luisi; and with internationally recognized soloists such as Kristof Barati, Joshua Bell, Renaud Capucon, Jinjoo Cho, Matthias Goerne, Joelle Harvey, and Golda Schultz. In addition to her Proms debut at Royal Albert Hall in 2013 as a member of the inaugural National Youth Orchestra of the United States, Katja toured Southeast Asia with the Lincoln Center Stage Piano Quintet aboard the MS Westerdam in 2019. Katja is an active and versatile chamber musician, and she frequently performs classical, tango, jazz, and contemporary music. Previous years have seen Katja performing at private events, community concerts, and at American music festivals including the Castleman Quartet Program, Bowdoin International Music Festival, and Aspen Music Festival as a fellowship recipient. Initially trained as a violinist in the Northern Virginia area where she grew up, she credits the foundations of her musical appreciation and technique to her very first teachers, David Strom and Tsuna Sakamoto. Other influential teachers and mentors include Victoria Chiang, Caroline Coade, Daniel Foster, Dimitri Murrath, and George Taylor. Katja has served as a member of the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra in Michigan, the Canton Symphony Orchestra in Ohio. She now lives in Nashville, Tennessee where she is a Suzuki instructor at Belmont Academy, and the Adjunct Professor of Violin & Viola at Tennessee State University (start Fall 2023). Katja can also be found playing major recording projects for companies like Sony and Netflix at Ocean Way in Music Row.