Jennifer Dunne
Collaborative Upper Strings Pedagogue
Jennifer Dunne is a professional musician with experience as a performer, educator, adjudicator, entrepreneur, recording artist, and eclectic-styles string improviser. Dunne has taught at the collegiate, pre-collegiate, high school, and grade school levels.
Dunne owns Signature Ensemble, a musical services company focused on the performance of string groups that provide live music throughout Chicagoland. It includes classical and alternative-styles string instruction at public and private schools on Chicago’s North and Northwest Sides. She is also the violin and viola instructor for Whitney M. Young Magnet High School’s orchestra.
She has taught violin, viola, and chamber music at Northwestern Music Academy. She has been on the Music Institute of Chicago faculty, coaching chamber music groups and conducting musicianship classes. Dunne has served on Trinity International University’s faculty as professor of violin and viola. Her students play in the Chicago Youth Symphony Orchestras and Hyde Park Youth Symphony.
Dunne graduated from Northwestern University with a Bachelor of Music in Violin Performance and returned to earn her Master of Music in Violin Performance and Upper Strings Pedagogy as an Illinois State Scholar and the Bienen School of Music’s only teaching fellow. While earning her master’s, she received the Susan M. Wilson Award for Music Excellence.
Dunne’s teachers include Blair Milton (Chicago Symphony Orchestra), Gerardo Ribeiro (Northwestern University and world-class soloist), Peter Blagoev (David Oistrakh Russian violin tradition), Andrew Bird (swing), Edgar Gabriel (String Groove method), John Moulder, and Zach Brock (jazz).
An active performer, Dunne regularly freelances in Chicagoland with her eclectic-style string band Parting Glass Trio, the Chicago Jazz Philharmonic orchestra, City Lights Orchestra, AWR Music, Chicago Philharmonic, the Ravinia Festival orchestra, Chicago Metropolis Symphony Orchestra, Musica Lumina orchestra, the Paderewski Symphony Orchestra, and the Chicago Chamber Orchestra.
She has performed with Smokey Robinson; Sarah McLachlan; Earth, Wind & Fire; Marco Antonio Sol铆s; and The CoverGirls. She has worked with Johnny Frigo, Dale Clevenger, James Conlon, Orbert Davis, Christoph Eschenbach, Jay Friedman, Patricia Handy, Dieter Kober, Erich Kunzel, Melody Lord, Marilyn McDonald, Max Raimi, Andrea Swan, Tatyana Stepanova, Sylvia Wang, Ray Still, and Paul Vermel.