Elizabeth Simkin

Cellist and teacher Elizabeth Simkin has recently returned to her hometown of Seattle, Washingon after retiring from nearly 30 years as a full time cello professor at Ithaca College.

 

Highlights of her academic career include innovative and collaborative offerings that built skill and community together such as:  a three mornings a week meditative scales class in a dimly lit room with a drone and metronome with bassist, Nicholas Walker; hosting the New Directions Cello Festival (exploring the current state of non-classical cello

music) for more than 10 years, with directors Chris White and Sera Smolen; co-developing (with music thanatologist, Jayne Demakos) a powerful course, Exploring Music as Medicine, where Ithaca College music students were paired with residents of high-skilled nursing facilities as “musical companions” where they experienced, first hand, the depth of connection possible with deeply attentive sharing of music.

 

Simkin was an artist teacher at the Bowdoin International Music Festival and at the Heifetz

International Music Institute, and has performed in 21 countries in festivals and tours, including representing the US as an Artistic Ambassador.

 

These days, she continues to return to the east coast for some of her longest lasting projects, like Cornell University’s new music group, Ensemble X, the Cayuga Chamber Orchestra and to teach the Advanced Cello Program at the Ithaca Suzuki Institute.  She was one of the first generation of Seattle Suzuki cellists with Carla Lumsden, then learned from Toby Saks in high school, then went to Oberlin, Eastman with Steve Doane and IU Bloomington where she studied with and became teaching assistant to Janos Starker.  In Seattle, Simkin has been free lancing (more than 60 Nutcrackers already!), working as an affiliate artist at the University of Puget Sound, teaching a few students in her home, enjoying being with family, rediscovering the Pacific Northwest with the Seattle Mountaineers and learning new ways of sharing daily life in a small, urban cohousing community.  She is mom to Cole, a guitarist and member of University of Puget Sound’s class of 2026.