String Quartet Intensive Program Directors

Annie Fullard joyfully celebrates more than 30 years as a founding member of The Cavani String Quartet, hailed by the Washington Post as “completely engrossing, powerful and elegant”. Ms. Fullard and her quartet colleagues are recipients of numerous awards including the Naumburg Chamber Music Award, Cleveland Quartet Competition, Banff, Fischoff, Carmel Competitions, and were twice awarded the Guarneri Quartet Award for Artistic Excellence. 

As a leader in the field of chamber music advocacy and education, Ms. Fullard served as faculty and Artist in Residence at the Cleveland Institute of Music (CIM) for the past 30 years. Ms. Fullard is currently a Distinguished Artist and the Charles and Mary Jane Yates Chair of Chamber Music at the Robert McDuffie Center for Strings at Mercer University. She served as a faculty member for Summer Performing Arts with Juilliard in Shanghai, China and is currently Co-Program Director of the String Quartet Intensive at ENCORE Chamber Music Institute. Lauded for her "gleaming artistry, bravura and sensitivity"(The Plain Dealer), she is a proactive and passionate advocate for chamber music and sees the empathy and connectivity of playing and teaching chamber music as a metaphor for the kind of communication between peoples and nations toward which we should strive. Ms. Fullard performs as a guest artist and presents master classes and lecture demonstrations at music festivals in all 50 states and abroad, including the Perlman Music Program, New World Symphony, Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, Aspen Music Festival and School, Interlochen Center for the Arts, Chautauqua Institution, Kneisel Hall, Encore Chamber Music, and Beaujolais (France) Stage 2019. 

Ms. Fullard and her colleagues in the Cavani Quartet serve as the Co-Artistic Directors of Arts Renaissance Tremont and she is the Director of Outreach for the Cleveland Chamber Music Society. She has served as a juror for the Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition, Discover National Competition, and Violin Society of America, and participated in the Violins of Hope Project. Recognizing the natural ability of chamber music playing to inspire cognitive and emotional development in children through empathy and interaction, she founded The Friday Night Chamber Music Program for pre-college students in 2016. Projects on the horizon include a book, The Art of Collaboration: Chamber Music Rehearsal Techniques and Teambuilding with writing partner Dorianne Cotter-Lockard, PhD. She pursued studies at Yale University, Indiana University, and the Eastman School of Music and performs on a violin modeled on Paganini’s made by Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume (1846). Teachers and mentors have included Donald Weilerstein, Josef Gingold, Franco Gulli, Earl Carlyss, and Peter Salaff. She enjoys downhill skiing, listening to Ella Fitzgerald and Beethoven, and has two cats: Art and Mewzik (who has a special affinity for the viola).