User:Claguem/Laura L. Jackson

Laura Jackson recently completed her first season as Music Director of the Reno Philharmonic in Reno, Nevada, where she is winning praise for inspiring leadership, innovative programming, passionate community engagement, and for creating the first-ever composer-in-residence program in the forty-year history of the RPO. She selected Reno-native Sean Shepherd, who has had premieres with the New York Philharmonic and Cleveland Orchestras, to serve in this role.

From 2004–2007, Ms. Jackson served as Assistant Conductor / American Conducting Fellow of the Atlanta Symphony under Robert Spano. In Atlanta, she conducted all types of concerts including Classical Subscription Series performances, Summer Pops, Young People's Concerts, and “Symphony 360” interactives, which sought to show the orchestral experience from every angle through an entertaining mix of demonstrations, interviews, and performance.

Ms. Jackson maintains an active guest conducting career with ensembles across the globe, including the orchestras of Alabama, Atlanta, Baltimore, Berkeley, Boca Raton, Cape Cod, Detroit, Fairfax, Modesto, North and South Carolina, Phoenix, and San Antonio, among others. With the Sacramento Symphony, she led the world premiere of Daron Hagen’s Masquerade, a concerto written for Jaime Laredo (violin) and his wife Sharon Robinson (cello). Ms. Jackson’s recent international engagements have included concerts with the Philippine Philharmonic plus the symphonies of Toronto and Winnipeg and the recording of Michael Daugherty’s Time Cycle with the Bournemouth Symphony in England.

Ms. Jackson won her first conducting position in 1992 with the Nashua Chamber Orchestra and served as Music Director there until 1998. In that year, she moved to Ann Arbor to study conducting with Kenneth Kiesler at the University of Michigan. In the summers, she participated in the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Tanglewood Music Festival. As the Seiji Ozawa Conducting Fellow at Tanglewood in 2003, she led concerts featuring both traditional and contemporary repertoire, including works by Iannis Xenakis, Augusta Read Thomas, and Kaija Saariaho. During her time at Michigan, she served as Music Director of the Life Sciences Orchestra, made up of doctors, researchers, students, and staff of the university’s medical community. She graduated in 2005 with a Doctorate in Orchestral Conducting.

She spent her early childhood in Virginia and Pennsylvania, before moving at age 11 to Plattsburgh, NY, where she grew up waterskiing, swimming, and sailing on Lake Champlain. She fell in love with the violin in public school and studied there until transferring to the North Carolina School of the Arts to finish high school. At age 17, she was a finalist in the Fischoff Chamber Music competition (performing Bela Bartók’s Contrasts). Ms. Jackson pursued an undergraduate degree at Indiana University where she studied both violin and conducting, before moving to Boston in 1990 to freelance as a professional violinist and teach at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire.