Brittany Merritt

Brittany Merritt lives in the Dallas, Texas, area and is the Executive Director and a Principal Player in Uptown Violins. She has taught lessons for fourteen years to ages ranging from three years old to university level students. She absolutely adores her students and loves helping shape their character as well as their musical skills every week. She studied Suzuki violin beginning at the age of three and Suzuki piano at the age of five. She attended Suzuki Institute in Ottawa, Kansas, for over six years, and attended Sound Encounters in Ottawa, Kansas, for four years under Alice Joy Lewis and Brian Lewis. Brittany later attended the MasterWorks Festival in Winona Lake, Indiana during the summer. Most recently Brittany has been a violin and jazz violin instructor at High Plains Music Camp, Southwestern College- Cole Family Summer Music Festival, and her own studio’s music camps every summer with Uptown Violins.

Brittany studied under violinist Chee-Yun Kim at Southern Methodist University earning a Master of Music degree. She attended college at Baylor University where she studied private violin lessons under Dr. Eka Gogichashvili. She was concertmaster of the Baylor Symphony as well as played in the Waco Symphony. As the Wichita Youth Talent Winner of 2007, she soloed with the Wichita Youth Symphony while also serving as concertmaster. The same year she received the Women’s Federated Music Award.

Now, Brittany uses her creative style and innovative ideas in her playing as well as in her teaching. She loves to perform classically alongside some symphonies such as the Dallas Chamber Symphony and the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, as well as use her Jazz improvisational skills as she arranges and plays various works in her small-ensemble music business, “Uptown Violins”. She plays on both acoustic and electric instruments and is a good judge of which instrument to use in different performance settings and ensemble sizes. Lastly, Brittany has even played in various country bands because you must learn to fiddle if you play in Texas!