Pianist Julie Nishimura, a past recipient of a Delaware State Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship, celebrates her sixteenth year as Faculty Accompanist for the Department of Music at the University of Delaware where she is also an instructor of the Sight-reading and Accompanying/Chamber Music courses. She has been on the accompanying faculty of San Francisco-based California Summer Music at Pebble Beach for nine years. In great demand as a collaborative artist, Ms. Nishimura has performed on the Philadelphia Orchestra Connection Series at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Orchestra Chamber Music Series in the Ballroom of the Academy of Music and in the Perelman Theater at the Kimmel Center, the Delaware Symphony's Chamber Music Series and the Wilmington Music School's Music Masters Series. She has also been a guest performer with the Delaware Chamber Music Festival, Philadelphia's Academy Chamber Players, the Hildegard Chamber Players and the Serafin String Quartet. Along with oboist Tim Clinch and French hornist Cynthia Carr, she is a founding member of Trio Arundel, now in its thirteenth year, regularly commissioning and premiering new works. Trio Arundel will be representing Wilmington's Sister Cities in Watford, England in May 2005, performing and giving workshops. Ms. Nishimura is also a member of the Vandermark Ensemble which gave its Weill Recital Hall debut in February of 2005. In 2003, Ms. Nishimura presented a chamber music recital with members of the Philadelphia Orchestra in Weill Recital Hall. She has served as Music Director and Pianist for the joint OperaDelaware and City Theater Company world premiere production of Out of the Rain, a teen opera dealing with the issues of AIDS, and for the Delaware Theatre Company's production of The Gift of the Magi. Currently, as Co-Artistic Directors of Distant Voices Touring Theatre, she and her husband, theatre director/writer/acting teacher Danny Peak, are touring Distant Voices, a musical/dramatic work highlighting the plight of Japanese American citizens in internment camps during World War II, and September Echoes, a musical/dramatic work based on the events of and after September 11, 2001. The News Journal has described her performances as "fiery," "dynamic," "vibrant," "highly animated" and "dramatic" while the Philadelphia Inquirer has written "Julie Nishimura brought poignancy to the first movement with phrasing in which the slightest rubato carried a big punch."

A native of San Francisco, Ms. Nishimura began piano studies at the age of seven in her hometown with Alla Sviridoff. She made her concerto debut at the age of sixteen with the San Francisco Symphony and the San Francisco Chronicle praised her performance as "very stylish, immaculately articulated...rather in the manner of Rudolf Serkin's Mozart." Subsequent studies were with Paul Hersh at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Leonard Shure at the New England Conservatory and Victor Rosenbaum of the Longy School of Music.