Performer, curator, and on-stage host James Austin Smith “proves that an oboist can have an adventurous solo career” (The New Yorker). Smith appears at leading national and international chamber music festivals, as Co-Principal Oboe of the conductor-less Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and as an artist of the International Contemporary Ensemble. As Artistic and Executive Director of Tertulia Chamber Music, Smith creates intimate evenings of music, food, and drink in New York, San Francisco, and beyond. He serves as Artistic Advisor to Coast Live Music in the San Francisco Bay Area and mentors graduate-level musicians as a professor of oboe and chamber music at Stony Brook University. Smith’s April 2027 Carnegie Hall debut recital, Elemental, connects the oboe to ancient, global traditions of double reed playing, asserting its role in the human soundscape. A Fulbright scholar and alum of Carnegie Hall’s Ensemble Connect and CMS’s Bowers Program, he holds degrees in music and political science from Northwestern and Yale University.