At Durham University Mieko Kanno specialises in the combined disciplines of performance and musicology in contemporary music. In 1994 she received the prestigious Kranichsteiner Musikpreis at the Darmstadt New Music Institute for the interpretation of contemporary music. Since then she has collaborated with many composers Europe-wide, commissioned and premiered new works, and has established herself as one of the leading exponents of contemporary music.

Her current long-term projects are on John Cage’s Freeman Etudes and on music involving electronics (Mieko works on the AHRC funded project 'Live Performance, the Interactive Computer and the Violectra', a collaboration with composer Sam Hayden). She regularly performs these works in concerts - she is also interested in how musical works gain identity today and this research is much informed by her practice.

In additon to her solo work Mieko Kanno is widely experienced as ensemble violinist and has been a leading participant in groups such as the New Music Players, Exposé, Apartment House, the Utrecht-based ensemble insomnio and others. She also plays the Baroque violin and has toured worldwide with the ensemble Florilegium.

Her background is the traditonal school of violin playing. At the age of 19 Mieko Kanno was invited to England to study with Yfrah Neaman at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, and achieved outstanding success in numerous violin competitions including the Rodolfo Lipizer Competition Italy (First Prize), London Carl Flesch Competition (Third Prize), Queen Elisabeth Competition (Seventh Prize), Tokyo International Violin Competition (Third Prize), Hannover Competition (Fifth Prize) and Jacques Thibaud Competition, Paris (Sixth Prize). Since then she has been performing worldwide and continues to do so today.

Mieko Kanno joined the Music Department at Durham in 2001. Before coming to Durham she taught at the Trinity College of Music, London. She has held residencies at the Dartington Summer School (last in 2007), the Banff Arts Centre (Canada, 2008), and was Research Fellow at the Orpheus Instituut (Ghent, 2008-10, part-funded by the Leverhulme Trust). In 2010-11 she was invited as Senior Scholar by the Cini Foundation (Venice) to carry out research at the Archivio Luigi Nono.