Julie Bickel

Julie Bickel joined the faculty of the Music Institute of Chicago in 2021.  She pioneered Virtuoso Strings, their new advanced touring ensemble.  In 2022, they embarked on their first tour to Hawaii.  This year, they will tour Italy for their first International Tour.  For over 20 years, Bickel worked at Wheaton College Community School of the Arts as a violin instructor and Director of the Vivaldi Strings touring chamber ensemble.  She taught for the Wheaton College Music Conservatory as faculty teaching String Pedagogy and mentoring Interns. She holds a B.A. in Violin Performance and a B.S. in Pre-Med from the University of Notre Dame, as well as a M.M. and Performers’ Certificate in Violin Performance and Pedagogy from Northern Illinois University.  Bickel has been a participant in all eleven of the Starling-DeLay Symposiums at the Juilliard School of Music.

Bickel studied with Betty Monahan, Almita and Roland Vamos, Rachel Barton Pine, Simin Ganatra, Mathias Tacke, Vermeer Quartet, and Brian Lewis.  

She has performed the Mendelssohn, Khachaturian, and Beethoven Concertos with orchestra and currently performs with the Butterfield String Quartet with colleagues, Anita Arch, Emily Puntuzs, and Dr. Tanya Carey. She has trained extensively since 1996 in Suzuki Pedagogy and has taught at various music institutes, including Sound Encounters in Ottawa, Kansas; Texas State University Suzuki Strings Institute in San Marcos, Texas; Intermountain Suzuki String Institute in Draper, Utah; DFW-WOW in Dallas, Texas; American Suzuki Institute in Stevens Point, Wisconsin; and the Chicago Suzuki Institute in Deerfield, Illinois.  

As the director of the Wheaton College Community School of the Arts’ Vivaldi Strings touring group, she prepared the group for national tours to Alaska, California, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Washington, and Wisconsin; and international tours to Austria, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, Japan, Morocco, Puerto Rico, Scotland, and Spain.  The group has been featured on both ABC and NBC Chicago affiliates as well as Beijing TV and the NHK Japanese-English website.  In 2012, the group was invited, all expenses paid, by the Chinese government to represent the USA along with 42 other countries in the International Children’s Culture and Art Festival.  Prior to Covid, they had planned to travel to Washington D.C. to participate in the 6th World Children’s Festival hosted by the International Child Art Foundation.

Bickel coordinated the Suzuki Youth Orchestras of the Americas for the 11th and 12th SAA Conferences.  At the 13th and 16th SAA Conferences in 2008 and 2014, Vivaldi Strings was selected to perform for the International Ensembles Concerts.  In 2014, Bickel was awarded Teacher of the Year from the Elgin Youth Symphony Orchestra.