Joan Jeanrenaud was born in 1956 and raised on a small farm outside Memphis, Tennessee. She started playing the cello at age 11 and developed an interest in contemporary music as a teenager. She continued her studies with Fritz Magg at Indiana University, where she was a founding member of the IU Contemporary Music Ensemble. Subsequently she moved to Geneva, Switzerland to study with Pierre Fournier. At age 22, Jeanrenaud joined the Kronos Quartet and relocated to San Francisco. For twenty years she worked with hundreds of composers and musicians such as John Cage, Terry Riley, Morton Feldman, Philip Glass, Joan Armatrading, David Byrne, John Zorn and many others. The quartet performed more than 2,000 concerts in the most renowned venues in the world and made more than 30 recordings, most of which were released on Nonesuch Records. She left the Kronos Quartet in 1999 to pursue independent artistic directions including composition, improvisation, electronics, video and multi-disciplinary performance. Jeanrenaud was an artist-in-residence at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in the 2000"01 season where she developed an evening length solo multimedia work, “Metamorphosis”, which received its world premiere at the Walker Art Center, May 2001; and “Ice Cello”, a four-hour installation piece inspired by the work of Fluxus artist Charlotte Moorman. |
