CCM welcomes new violin faculty member Kenneth Renshaw

UC College-Conservatory of Music Dean Pete Jutras has announced the appointment of Kenneth Renshaw as CCM's new Assistant Professor of Violin. His faculty appointment officially begins on Aug. 15, 2025.

Equally committed to teaching and mentoring the next generation of young musicians, Renshaw has served as Teaching Assistant to Itzhak Perlman at the Juilliard School since 2018. He also served as Teaching Assistant for Li Lin since 2017. Under his guidance, students have won top prizes in the Yehudi Menuhin, Zhuhai, Leonid Kogan, Johansen, Michael Hill, Elmar Oliviera, Stulberg and Louis Spohr International Competitions. He has built a thriving private violin studio in New York, with students winning many regional and national competitions and acceptances to Juilliard, New England Conservatory, Colburn, the New World Symphony, Music@Menlo, Morningside Music Bridge and other notable institutions.

Renshaw has served as chamber music faculty at the Perlman Music Program's Summer Music School and Sarasota Winter Residency, and the Crowden Music Center's Chamber Music Workshop. In 2018 he participated in a cultural exchange residency in São Paulo, Brazil teaching masterclasses and mentoring students from GURI Youth Orchestra programs, sponsored by Juilliard.

Committed to using technology to bring greater access to high level string teaching to a global audience, Renshaw served as a content editor and pedagogical consultant for Itzhak Perlman's "Masterclass" series on masterclass.com. He is also a passionate advocate for collaboration between different artistic mediums, spearheading performances and educational workshops with pianist/composer and multimedia artist Yang Bao and dancer/movement expert Whitney Schmanski at the Island Arts Music Festival in Vermont and public arts schools in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Renshaw holds both bachelor's and master's degrees from the Juilliard School, where he studied with Itzhak Perlman, Li Lin, Donald Weilerstein and Paul Neubauer as recipient of the Kovner Fellowship. He is an alumnus of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Precollege Division and the Crowden School.

Recently, Renshaw has cultivated an interest in pre-60s Romani jazz, becoming a member of the San Francisco-based musical collective Cantadora and the Hot Clams in 2020. He continues to perform with them to this day, most recently at the Cascais Jazz Festival in Portugal, and on their newly-formed performance series Music and Mariners in Sausalito, California. He hopes to bring the sense of connection, joy and spontaneity of live improvisation to his work as a classical performer and educator.

"Kenneth Renshaw is a highly sought after performer with major competition wins and a distinguished resume of orchestral, chamber and solo appearances. His teaching and artistic presence will be an outstanding addition to CCM's Strings Department," said Jutras. "I am grateful to our search committee chair Rachel Calin and committee members Sandra Rivers and Kurt Sassmannshaus for their efforts with this successful search."

Featured image at top: Violinist Kenneth Renshaw performs. Photo/Da Ping Luo