About Ilana

Jewish-American violinist Ilana Zaks has performed with numerous orchestras including the Boston Civic, Rhode Island Philharmonic, and Cape Cod Symphony. Since 2013, she has been a member of the Perlman Music Program in which she has been studying with legendary Itzhak Perlman. She has also participated in masterclasses with Augustin Hadelich, Michael Stern, Alon Goldstein, Hagai Shaham, Soovin Kim, Benjamin Zander, Joel Krosnick, Vivian Weilerstein, Peter Salaff, Nicholas Kitchen, David Stern and Katharina Wolff. She also studied with Donald Weilerstein for 12 years at New England Conservatory.

As an entrepreneur, Ilana’s passion resides in creating theatrical multidisciplinary collaboration, breaking the stereotypes of modern musical experiences through inclusion of contemporary works by women, popular recital works, and works she commissions. Her Jewish identity inspires her to advance tikkun olam through creating community within a diverse group of people and fighting for educational accessibility, the advancement of gender equality, and increased representation of women in leadership roles. An advocate for contemporary music, Ilana won an NEC EM grant for her commissioning project of four violin and percussion duo works featuring multidisciplinary collaborations. The result of this project was her debut album and first ever visual album “The Persistence of Memory”, which was released on Amazon Prime US and UK in July 2020. Currently pursuing her Master’s degree at Yale, she is a 2020-2021 CCAM fellow, for which she is directing her third film, to be released virtually on May 10th, 2021.

How You Can Work Together

“I enjoy working with communities, ranging from assisted living communities to presenting school workshops to performing benefit recitals for food pantries, women’s shelters and after school programs.”