Marika Hughes

Marika Hughes is a New York cellist and singer whose playing joins her classical training to folk, jazz, blues, soul and the avant-garde. She leads Bottom Heavy and The New String Quartet, was a founding member of 2 Foot Yard and Red Pocket, and has held the cello chair in the Broadway production of Hadestown. Her self-released albums include The Simplest Thing and Afterlife Music Radio, both from 2011, and New York Nostalgia in 2016. She has recorded and performed with Whitney Houston, Lou Reed, David Byrne, Adele, D'Angelo, Henry Threadgill, Anthony Braxton and Nels Cline. A native New Yorker, she grew up around Burgundy, her parents' Upper West Side jazz club, is the granddaughter of cellist Emanuel Feuermann, and studied in the joint program at Barnard College and the Juilliard School; she also founded Looking Glass Arts, an artist residency and youth education program upstate.