Karina Canellakis

Karina Canellakis was born in New York City and began her career as a violinist. She graduated from the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia in 2004 and went on to the orchestra academy of the Berlin Philharmonic, where Simon Rattle encouraged her to take up conducting. She won the Georg Solti Conducting Award in 2016. Since 2019 she has been chief conductor of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, the first woman to hold that post, and she is principal guest conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra. She was the first woman to conduct the Nobel Prize Concert in Stockholm, in 2018, and the First Night of the BBC Proms, in 2019. With the Radio Philharmonic she began a cycle of Janáček’s operas in 2022.