Stephanie Winters


Stephanie Winters is an American New York-based cellist with a wide-ranging career as a keynote speaker, facilitator and coach. Winters creates leadership-themed programs and has performed for organizations such as Lincoln Center, The World Bank, United Nations Development Program and Harvard University and acts as a workshop facilitator. She has performed and recorded with various musicians including Richie Havens, Enya, Dar Williams, Ellie Goulding, Anne Murray, Michael Jones, Paula Cole, Corrine Bailey Rae and The O'Jays. She has played on more than 100 CDs and toured extensively in the North America, Europe and Southeast Asia.

Education

Winters began her cello studies as a fourth grader in the Levittown public school music program and then attended the Pre-College Division of the Juilliard School. Winters earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in cello performance from the State University of New York at Purchase and a Master of Arts from Columbia University in Music Education. She has taught instrumental performance at the New School and privately. Winters is also a certified Feldenkrais Method practitioner and personal trainer.

Career

From 1991-99, Winters performed in the alternative-folk duo The Nudes with Walter Parks. The Nudes released three CD albums: The Nudes, Velvet Sofa, and Boomerang, and licensed recordings to an HBO series. Billboard magazine described the duo's first CD as unlike "anything else on the airwaves."
From 2004 to 2008, Winters and Parks toured as a trio with Richie Havens. Various venues included the Cannes Film Festival, Carnegie Hall, Monte Carlo Sporting Festival, Chiasso Festate, Solidays and Womad Festival. She played on Haven's CDs Grace of the Sun and Nobody Left to Crown.
Winters has performed live on National Public Radio, BBC, CBC, Radio France, and Radio Switzerland. Her television appearances include Saturday Night Live, Regis and Kelly, Good Morning America and One Shot Not.
In 2009, Winters co-directed a short film with Marie LeClaire titled Cello about a day in her life as a cellist.
She also co-developed and taught the program 'Bach to the Future' for the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts Meet the Artist Schools Series with Paul Guzzone; and designed thematic concerts by the Stephanie Winters Cello Ensemble for the Center's Meet the Artist Custom Programs.
Winters performed the inaugural concert of original songs with Dina Richardson at the David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York, NY 2009. With Duncan McCargo, she was commissioned to write and perform a new production, Titanic Tales: Stories of Courage and Cowardice, at the David Rubenstein Atrium at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts on April 12, 2012. The production features spoken word passages from survivors' accounts, along with music originally performed on the ill-fated liner.
Winters is Founder and Artistic Director of the Bach Cello Suites Festival 300 Anniversary Celebration, a mobile festival, which will make its world premier at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall March 3, 2020 in New York City.

Recordings

Winter's solo debut CD, Through the Storm, was re-released in 2009 with two new tracks, "Mercy Street" by Peter Gabriel and "Magnolia" by Richie Havens. Other tracks include pieces by Béla Bartók, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Carlos Paredes, Thomas A. Dorsey, and her brother James Winters, as well as two of her own compositions. Winters plays all cello parts on the CD. Producer Alan Williams engineered the CD and arranged several of the cuts.

Additional sources