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 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 and the 2007 Guarneri String Quartet Award from Chamber Music America. 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, and Anna Weesner. The Daedalus Quartet has recorded both contemporary and older music for Bridge Records and Naxos. Daedalus has been in residence at the University of Pennsylvania since 2006.

In addition to her appearances with the Daedalus Quartet, Ms. Thompson has performed at numerous festivals, including Aspen, Taos, Marlboro, the Portland, Charlottesville, Mimir, Skaneateles, and Sebago-Long Lake Chamber Music festivals, and Bard Summerscapes. She has toured with Musicians from Marlboro and performs regularly as a core member of the East Coast Chamber Orchestra, of which she serves as co-executive director, and with the String Orchestra of NYC. She is also a founding member of Trio Candesco, a flute/viola/harp trio. Ms. Thompson has appeared as soloist with the Minnesota Orchestra and in recital in cities such as New York, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Princeton, and Washington, DC. She currently teaches at Princeton and Columbia Universities as well as serving on the faculty of the Maine Chamber Music Seminar. 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.