Ayano Ninomiya has won numerous prizes, including the Naumburg International Violin Competition, the Tibor Varga International competition, Astral Artists National Auditions and the Young Performers Career Advancement awards.  She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University and holds a Master’s degree from The Juilliard School. As a recipient of the Beebe Fellowship, she studied at the Liszt Academy in Budapest, Hungary and researched scores at the Bartok Archives. Ayano is deeply committed to communicating with her audiences and creating invigorating live performance experiences. She gave a talk on the power of live performance at the 2012 TEDx event hosted by the University of Tokyo. Her recent concert activities have brought her to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., to Lincoln Center, NYC, to Tokyo, Japan, and ongoing community engagement performances at schools, community centers, and private homes.

Since joining the Ying Quartet as First Violinist in 2010, Ayano has given performances across the U.S. and in China. She has released two albums recently with the quartet, and another will enter circulation this year. As a chamber musician, Ayano has appeared at the Marlboro, Ravinia, Kingston, Skaneateles, Caramoor, and Moab music festivals, as well as Prussia Cove’s International Musicians Seminar.

Ayano’s debut recital at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall was described as “deeply communicative and engrossing” (The New York Times) and her debuts and performances with orchestras have brought her to all of the major venues in NYC as well as Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and across Europe and Japan.

Ayano is Associate Professor of Violin and Chamber Music at the Eastman School of Music. She is an enthusiastic practitioner of the martial art Aikido