Known for his “disciplined focus and clarity… and marvelous dynamic nuance,” (Arts Knoxville) Ray Ushikubo is a twenty-two-year-old Japanese-American pianist and violinist who has performed on the stages of Carnegie Hall and Walt Disney Concert Hall, and appeared on NBC’s The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. Ushikubo made his orchestral debut at age ten with the Young Musicians Foundation Orchestra in Los Angeles’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion with Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 alongside conductor Teddy Abrams. A recipient of the prestigious Davidson Fellow Laureate Award in 2014, Ushikubo was named a Young Steinway Artist and won the 2017 Hilton Head International Piano Competition and the 2016 Piano Concerto Competition at the Aspen Music Festival and School. Ushikubo was featured as a Young Artist-in-Residence of the national radio broadcast Performance Today with host Fred Child and he has been featured on NPR’s From the Top where he was named a Jack Kent Cooke Young Artist.

Ushikubo received his bachelor’s degrees at the Curtis Institute of Music, where he studied piano with Gary Graffman and Robert McDonald and violin with Shmuel Ashkenasi and Pamela Frank, and Aaron Rosand. Currently, Ushikubo is enrolled at the Colburn Conservatory of Music pursuing Master of Music degrees where he studies piano with Fabio Bidini and violin with Robert Lipsett.