Miranda Cuckson delights audiences with her performances of music ranging from older eras to the newest creations. An internationally acclaimed soloist and collaborator, violinist and violist, she enjoys performing at venues large and small, from concert halls to casual spaces.  She has been a featured artist at the Berlin Philharmonie, Suntory Hall, Teatro Colón, Cleveland Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, San Francisco’s Herbst Theater, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra’s Liquid Music, 92nd St Y, National Sawdust, and the Ojai, Bard, Marlboro, Portland, Music Mountain, West Cork, Grafenegg, Wien Modern, Frequency, and LeGuessWho festivals.

Georg Friedrich Haas composed his Violin Concerto No. 2 (2017) for her, inspired by her performances of his violin piece “de terrae fine”. She premiered the concerto with three co-commissioning orchestras – the Tokyo Symphony with Ilan Volkov, Staatsorchester Stuttgart with Sylvain Cambreling, and Casa da Música in Porto with Baldur Brönnimann – followed by performances in Austria at the Grafenegg Festival and with the Vienna Radio Symphony at the Musikverein.  She also recently gave the premiere of Marcela Rodriguez’s Violin Concerto with the National Symphony Orchestra of Mexico and Sylvain Gasançon. She gave the NY premiere of the Violin Concerto by Michael Hersch, with Ensemble Échappé and Jeffrey Milarsky. Her Carnegie Hall solo debut was in Walter Piston’s Concerto No. 1 with the American Symphony Orchestra.

While dedicated to the Western classical repertoire, Miranda has played countless concerts and premieres of new works and helped to bring new creations more to the center of concert life. Drawing on her deeply felt perspective as a multiethnic American, Miranda works with composers and artists from many backgrounds. Those who have written works for her include Georg Friedrich Haas, Michael Hersch, Jason Eckardt, George Lewis, Wang Lu, Jeffrey Mumford, Dongryul Lee, Stewart Goodyear, Steve Lehman, Harold Meltzer, Ileana Perez Velasquez, Douglas Boyce, Reiko Füting, Diego Tedesco, Alex Stephenson, and Aida Shirazi. She has performed in concert with composer-performers Anthony Cheung, Huang Ruo, Vijay Iyer, Nina C. Young, Michael Hersch, and Philip Glass. In addition to supporting young artists, she has worked with celebrated composers including Dutilleux, Adams, Carter, Adès, Sciarrino, Boulez, Hyla, Mackey, Crumb, Lachenmann, Saariaho, Davidovsky, Hurel, Ran, Wyner, Murail, Wuorinen, Currier, Harbison, and Rzewski.

Miranda has released eleven albums, including Nono’s “La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura” (Urlicht) with Christopher Burns, named a Best Recording of the year by the New York Times, and her ECM Records album of Bartók, Lutoslawski, and Schnittke duos with Blair McMillen. Her live performance of the Ligeti Violin Concerto with Christian Baldini and the UCDavis Orchestra was released on Centaur Records, as was her album of the Ponce and Korngold concertos with the Czech National Symphony. She was awarded grants from the Copland Fund (four times in a row) to record works by Ross Lee Finney, Donald Martino, and Ralph Shapey. Her other albums include the Sessions solo Sonata and duos Elliott Carter and Jason Eckardt; “the wreckage of flowers” by Michael Hersch; “Melting the Darkness”, microtonal and electro-acoustic pieces; and music by Wolpe, Carter and Ferneyhough. 

Since her student years, Miranda freelanced and worked with almost every group and music organization in New York City. She was violinist of the Momenta String Quartet (2004-08), Argento Chamber Ensemble (2003-2011), American Contemporary Music Ensemble (2005-2010), Sequitur (2006-14), Composers Conference (2009-19), and counter)induction (2009-21). She is founder/director of Nunc. At Brooklyn venue National Sawdust, she is a frequent performer and is on their artistic advisory council.

A member of interdisciplinary collective AMOC, Miranda has continually engaged with the various forms of art. In 2019, she was presented by National Sawdust’s multimedia Ferus Festival. She performed the Stravinsky Duo Concertant at BAM with the State Ballet of Georgia, Barber Violin Concerto with the touring New York City Ballet, and Stravinsky Violin Concerto with NYCB soloists for the Balanchine centennial. She has collaborated with the NY Choreographic Institute and New Chamber Ballet. With Chris Burns, she has performed Nono’s “La lontananza” a dozen times, exploring its spatial and theatrical concepts in a wide variety of settings.

At the Mannes School of Music at New School University, she teaches violin and chamber music. She has done residencies and masterclasses at Juilliard, MSM, UC San Diego, UC Davis, Peabody Institute, Brown University, Williams College, Rice University, East Carolina University, Lawrence University, Hunter College, CUNY, Princeton University, Florida State, and more.

Miranda is an alumna of The Juilliard School, having studied there from age 9 in the Pre-College division through her college degrees, including her doctorate. She was a Starr Fellow and won the Juilliard’s Presser Music Award, as well as the Richard French Prize for her doctoral dissertation on American composer Ross Lee Finney. Her main teachers were Robert Mann, Dorothy DeLay, Felix Galimir, Shirley Givens, Fred Sherry, and Samuel Rhodes and Joel Smirnoff of the Juilliard Quartet.

A US citizen of Austrian, English, and Taiwanese descent, she was born in Australia to composer Robert Cuckson and pianist May Yang Cuckson.