Jodi Beder

Jodi Beder has wide experience in the performance of orchestral, chamber, and operatic repertoire and on studio recordings with singers. On modern and baroque cello, she has performed at the Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, the Washington National Cathedral, and the Folger Library. She was the long-time cellist for innovative cabaret-rock band Zen for Primates, and in Dovetail, a multicultural ensemble of musicians and percussive dancers. Cellist for Brooklyn Heights Synagogue since 1985, she also plays klezmer. A composer and arranger, she collaborated with Caleen Jennings at American University, and on Jennings’s powerful Hands Up, written for Forum Theatre’s (Re)Acts response to events in Ferguson and around the country, and she is a frequent collaborator with poets and dancers. She currently works with the nonprofit A Musical Heart to provide one-on-one musical visits with hospice patients. She found another ministry in 2020, playing cello daily on her porch for her community and then online for people around the world, work that was featured in the Washington Post, ABC-TV, and newspapers across the globe. She studied music composition with Miriam Gideon, and earned her PhD in music theory from CUNY Graduate Center. She teaches cello, improvisation, and music theory, and copyedits music, poetry, and other books for Princeton University Press and WW Norton.