Katherine Ma

Katherine Ma, who will soon be heading to the San Francisco Conservatory of Music to study with Simon James, is in her second year of tertiary studies at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music studying under Associate Professor Dr Curt Thompson. She started playing violin at age 5 with Emin Tagiev in Queensland and following her family’s relocation to Melbourne, she learnt from Dr Alexandra Hiew, Leonid Zeyde, and Mark Mogilevski. Katherine is very grateful to be supported in her tertiary education by the Rose Mant Scholarship, Artistic Operations Grant, and the Corinna D’Hage Mayer String Scholarship.

Katherine is an avid musician engaging in soloist, chamber and orchestral opportunities. She has been a participant in numerous Australian Youth Orchestra programs since 2023, most recently being their Momentum Ensemble project “Beautiful Equations”. Katherine also is a Concertmaster of the University of Melbourne Symphony Orchestra this year and was previously Concertmaster of the Flagship Melbourne Youth Orchestra in 2023 and 2024. During those years, Katherine performed as a soloist with MYO and represented the organisation in a masterclass with renowned violinist Maxim Vengerov. Other notable artists she has received masterclasses from include Simon James, Sophie Rowell, Dale Barltrop, Francesca Hiew, and the faculty at the Mimir Chamber Music Festival: Jun Iwasaki, Stephen Rose, Joan DerHovsepian and Brant Taylor.

Katherine is currently a member of the Kite Quartet with her peers at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music. Previously, she has played in SEEK quartet and Found Quartet who won Musica Viva’s “Strike A Chord” String Prize in 2024. She has been playing in the university’s String Ensemble directed by Sophie Rowell since her first year and has gone to Sydney with them for an Australian Chamber Orchestra residency where they worked with the Ripieno and Principal players and Artistic Director, Richard Tognetti.

Outside of playing, Katherine has taken an interest to pedagogy and teaches at an El Sistema based outreach program called “Crashendo!”. She is passionate about passing her education on to others and would like to see the tradition of classical music grow.