L
AURA
J
ACKSON — is described by audiences as "passionate, personable, engaging, innovative, charismatic, musical, and effervescent"(1). Now in her eleventh season as Music Director and Conductor of
the Reno Philharmonic, she continues to win praise for her artistry, leadership,
innovative programming, and creative community engagement.
Her passion and drive have helped the Reno Philharmonic
reach new heights with engaging composer-in-residence projects, vibrant
performances of traditional repertoire, and collaborations that captivate the
enthusiasm of the local community as well as the symphonic industry
nationwide.
In addition to classical, pops, ballet, and educational
concerts with the Reno Philharmonic, Ms. Jackson guest conducts nationally and
internationally. Recent performances have included concerts with the symphonies
of Eugene, Hartford, Charlottesville, Hawaii, Flint, the Philly POPS, and L’Orchestre symphonique de Bretagne in
France. In addition, Jackson recently returned to perform with the Atlanta
Symphony, where she previously served as their first-ever female assistant
conductor from 2004–7, working closely with Music Director Robert Spano.
Jackson recorded Michael Daugherty’s Time
Cycle on Naxos with the Bournemouth Symphony in partnership with Marin
Alsop and
received
an invitation from the U.S. State Department in 2013 to serve as the first
American to lead the Algerian National Orchestra.
Other international engagements include concerts in
China and the Philippines. In North America, she has performed with the
symphonies of Alabama, Baltimore, Berkeley, Detroit, Phoenix, San Antonio,
Toledo, Toronto, Windsor, and Winnipeg, among others.
Prior to her appointment in Atlanta, she studied
conducting at the University of Michigan and spent summers at the Boston
Symphony Orchestra’s Tanglewood Music Center in 2002 and 2003. As the Seiji
Ozawa Conducting Fellow at Tanglewood, she conducted numerous concerts
featuring both traditional and contemporary repertoire.
Ms. Jackson spent her early childhood
in Virginia and Pennsylvania before moving at age 11 to Plattsburgh, New York,
where she grew up waterskiing, swimming, and sailing on Lake Champlain. She
fell in love with the violin in public school, later attending the North
Carolina School for the Arts to finish high school. She pursued an
undergraduate degree at Indiana University where she studied both violin and
conducting before moving to Boston in 1990 to freelance as a violinist and
teach at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. She holds a DMA in orchestral conducting from the University of Michigan, where she studied with Kenneth Kiesler.
(1) Judith F. Simpson, Fifty Years of the Reno Philharmonic, 2019, p. 74.