Graeme Steele Johnson

Winner of the Hellam Young Artists’ Competition, the Yamaha Young Performing Artists Competition and the inaugural Lee Memorial Scholarship from the Center for Musical Excellence, Graeme Steele Johnson has established a multifaceted career as a clarinetist, writer and arranger. His diverse artistic endeavors range from his TEDx talk comparing Mozart and Seinfeld, to his music- and poetry-weaving show IMPRESSION—based on his octet arrangement of Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun—to his performances of Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto on a rare elongated clarinet that he commissioned.

He has appeared recently in recital at The Kennedy Center and Chicago's Dame Myra Hess series, and as a chamber musician at Carnegie Hall, the Ravinia Festival, Phoenix Chamber Music Festival and Chamber Music Northwest. As a concerto soloist, he has performed with the Vienna International Orchestra, Springfield Symphony Orchestra, Caroga Lake and Vermont Mozart Festival Orchestras and the CME Chamber Orchestra, with upcoming concert and recording engagements with the Lviv Philharmonic in Ukraine.

Johnson holds graduate degrees from the Yale School of Music, where he was twice awarded the school's Alumni Association Prize. His major teachers include David Shifrin, Nathan Williams and Ricardo Morales, and he is now a doctoral candidate at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York under the mentorship of Charles Neidich.

In 2021, Johnson joined the faculty of the Mahanaim School in Huntington, New York as Adjunct Professor of Clarinet. He has given masterclasses and lectures at Rutgers and Missouri State Universities, taught undergraduate clarinet at Yale College, and is a teaching artist for Long Island Chamber Music and Veeko, Inc. His teaching blends practical knowledge gathered from renowned pedagogues and his own performing experience with a sense of wonder and humor for the musical score to elicit a personal, characterful sense of musicianship from each student.