ABOUT
Jenny Davis is a musician, educator, and arts administrator in Memphis, TN. What drives her work in all these endeavors is a passion for bringing people together to make and experience art in order to cultivate a curious, supportive, and thriving creative community. She is the Director of Operations for the Memphis Youth Symphony Program and a member of the Rhodes College Music Department faculty where she teaches flute and chamber music. She is a co-founder of the Blueshift Ensemble, a contemporary chamber ensemble collective. Jenny also performs with the Memphis Symphony Orchestra (substitute flute/piccolo) and her other projects include if.else experimental flute duo and Eudaimonia flute quartet.
She is a doctoral candidate at the University of South Carolina where she was a Graduate Teaching Assistant and holds an MM from Boston University and a BM from Middle Tennessee State University. From 2011 to 2013, Jenny completed two years of postgraduate studies with Trevor Wye at his Flute Studio in the UK. In 2014 and 2015, Jenny was a teaching apprentice at the Boston Flute Academy, where she was mentored by teaching artist Judy Grant. She has studied privately with Dr. Jennifer Parker-Harley, Linda Toote, Trevor Wye, and Dr. Deanna Little and was fortunate to attend numerous classes with the late William Bennett.
Passionate about performing and supporting the work of living composers, Jenny co-founded Blueshift Ensemble with cellist/composer Jonathan Kirkscey in 2016. Blueshift Ensemble is a contemporary chamber music ensemble dedicated to bringing artists and audiences together through artistic collaboration and by presenting performances in nontraditional spaces. Blueshift has collaborated with hip hop and visual artist Don Lifted, composer Evan Williams, singer/songwriters Harlan T. Bobo and Mark Edgar Stuart, visual artist Terri Phillips, and has an ongoing collaboration with NYC-based composer collective ICEBERG New Music. Since 2017, ICEBERG joins Blueshift in Memphis for a week-long residency in which the composers present free public workshops and presentations and two public performances of the ten composers’ works performed by Blueshift.
In past summers, Jenny was selected as a performing fellow at the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival at MASS MoCA, New Music on the Point, Cortona Sessions for New Music, and presented at nief norf Summer Music Festival’s Genre Lines Research Summit with her experimental flute duo if.else. If.else commissioned composer Randy Gibson for a new work titled The Four Pillars Breathing in Harmonic Time and will premiere in Memphis in December 2022.
During her time as a student, Jenny was a winner or finalist in a number of flute competitions including the James Pappoutsakis Memorial Flute Competition, Byron Hester Competition, Myrna Brown (semifinalist), Flute Society of Kentucky Young Artist Competition, Raleigh Area Flute Competition (semifinalist), COFA, South Carolina Flute Society Young Artist Competition, Beethoven Club of Memphis Young Artist Competition, and BachFest (Murfreesboro, TN).
In her free time, Jenny enjoys studying and practicing the Alexander Technique, baking, running, and hanging out with her cat Momma.
Momma:
