Julia Kay Jamieson is an energetic performer, dedicated teacher, composer and award-winning harpist living in Champaign, Illinois. A passionate advocate for new music, she is the principal harpist of the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, has given numerous world premiere performances and has performed in SEAMUS (Society for Electroacoustic Music in the United States) conferences. Julia has been a featured concert artist, clinician and composer for events such as the Illinois Summer harp class, the annual Harp Day in Eugene, Oregon, and the Canadian International Summer Harp Institute in Vancouver.
She has been commissioned to write several harp ensemble pieces including Sea in 2015 for Illinois Summer Harp Class and Creatures for the 2013 High Cascade Harp Retreat. As a founding member of the quartet, The HarpCore 4, Julia has innovatively arranged and performed popular 1980s music throughout the country, including a performance in the 2015 Midwest Harp Festival in Tulsa, OK.
As a professional harpist, she won First Prize in the 2002 American String Teachers Association (ASTA) National Biennial Solo Competition. Julia was the winner of the School of Music Concerto Competition Finals in 2008; she was awarded a performance of Rodrigo’s Concierto di Aranjuez with the University of Illinois Symphony Orchestra. She has also been a soloist with the Illinois Symphony Orchestra (2010) and the Danville Symphony Orchestra (2009 and 2018). Julia studied with Jocelyn Chang in Cleveland for over a decade, Susann McDonald at Indiana University (BM), and Ann Yeung at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (MM) where she served as the teaching assistant in harp. During her tenure as teaching assistant, she was awarded the highest teaching honor at the University of Illinois: the Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (2009).
Julia's interest in harp pedagogy and composition has led her to writing teaching materials including The Young at Harp - a method/solo book for beginning harpists, giving several workshops and master classes for harpists and composers and writing articles for the American Harp Journal. During the summer of 2015 Julia gave fearless improv workshops for the American Harp Society Summer Institute in Logan, Utah. In 2016 she was a co-director of a youth harp ensemble at the American Harp Society National Conference in Atlanta. She was the chair of the American Harp Society Music Education Auditions and Evaluations program from 2014-2023. In 2017 she became the founding chair of the AHS Young Composers Project, a program that encourages and celebrates young harpist-composers.