Vijay Gupta
Robert Vijay Gupta is a violinist, and advocate for social justice. He is a 2018 recipient of the MacArthur "Genius" Grant.Early life
Robert Vijay Gupta was born in 1987 and grew up near New York City. His parents had immigrated from India in the 1970s. At age 7 Gupta enrolled in the pre-college program at the Juilliard School and age 11 he performed solo for the first time with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. At 17 he earned a BA from Marist College, in biology. He earned an M.M. in 2007 from Yale University. Gupta did an internship at Harvard, in a medical lab. He joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2007, when he was 19 years old.
Gupta became an advocate for the homeless shortly after joining the LA Philharmonic. Gupta began to teach Nathaniel Ayers on the violin, who was a Juilliard-trained double-bassist whose mental illness left him homeless. Gupta met Ayers through Steve Lopez, the Los Angeles Times columnist who did a series on Ayers, which became a book and movie called "The Soloist."
In 2010 Gupta founded ”Street Symphony”, a non-profit organization providing musical engagement, dialogue and teaching artistry for homeless and incarcerated communities in Los Angeles. The organization performs at jails, shelters and transitional facilities. Every December the group performs Handel's "Messiah," with musicians from skid row joining with professional musicians to perform. In 2012 Gupta presented a "TED Talk" entitled "Between Music and Medicine." In 2017 Gupta was given the "Leonard Bernstein Lifetime Achievement Award for the Elevation of Music in Society." Gupta was the keynote speaker at the 2019 National Planning Conference in San Francisco.
