Suwanai Akiko studied at the Toho Gakuen School with Toshiya Eto, at Columbia University and the Juilliard School with Dorothy DeLay and Cho-Liang Lin, and at the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin with Uwe-Martin Haiberg. A laureate of the Paganini and Japan international competitions, she won the Tchaikovsky Competition in 1990 and was second laureate in the 1989 Queen Elisabeth Competition. Her international career has seen her perform recently with the Orchestre de Paris, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Philharmonia Orchestra, the BBC Philharmonic and Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra. This season she toured with the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia (Sir Antonio Pappano), the Philadelphia Orchestra (Yannick Nézet- Séguin), and the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen (Paavo Järvi). She has collaborated with renowned conductors such as Vladimir Ashkenazy, Valery Gergiev, Lorin Maazel, Sakari Oramo, Seiji Ozawa and Esa-Pekka Salonen among others. Her extensive discography on Universal has garnered much critical acclaim. She is also an Artistic Director of the International Music Festival NIPPON, performs on the Stradivarius ‘Dolphin’ violin from 1714, which has been kindly loaned to her by the Nippon Music Foundation.