Violist Jessica Thompson is a passionate chamber musician who performs regularly throughout the United States and abroad as a member of the Daedalus Quartet. Praised by the New Yorker as “a fresh and vital young participant in what is a golden age of American string quartets,” Daedalus has performed in such venues as Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center in New York, the Library of Congress and the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, DC, the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia, and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Abroad, the quartet has appeared in leading venues in Vienna, Cologne, Amsterdam, Paris, Tokyo, and Shanghai. The quartet has won numerous awards, including Grand Prize of the 2001 Banff International String Quartet Competition, the 2007 Martin E. Segal Award from Lincoln Center, and the 2007 Guarneri String Quartet Award from Chamber Music America. Daedalus has been in residence at the University of Pennsylvania since 2006 and is presenting the complete cycle of Beethoven quartets at the University during the 2017/18 season. The quartet has been recognized for its commitment to new music and has premiered works by composers such as Fred Lerdahl, Vivian Fung, Joan Tower, Richard Wernick, Anna Weesner, and Lawrence Dillon. The Daedalus Quartet has recorded discs of the music of George Perle, Fred Lerdahl, Lawrence Dillon, Haydn, and Sibelius, Stravinsky, and Ravel for Bridge Records as well as music of Joan Tower for Naxos.

In addition to her appearances with the Daedalus Quartet, Ms. Thompson has performed at numerous festivals, including Aspen, Taos, Marlboro, the Portland Chamber Music Festival, and the Newport Music Festival, has toured with Musicians from Marlboro, and performs regularly with the East Coast Chamber Orchestra. Ms. Thompson has appeared as soloist with the Minnesota Orchestra and in recital in cities such as Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and Washington, DC. She currently teaches at Princeton University and Columbia University. She is a graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music, where she studied with Karen Tuttle. Ms. Thompson performs on an instrument made in 1818 in Milan by Giacomo Rivolta.