Eliot Bailen has an active career as an artistic director, cellist, composer and teacher. Strings Magazine writes, “At Merkin Hall ‘cellist Eliot Bailen displayed a warm focused tone, concentrated expressiveness and admirable technical command always at the service of the music.”
Founder and Artistic Director of the Sherman Chamber Ensemble, now celebrating its 43rd year, whose performances the New York Times has described as “the Platonic ideal of a chamber music concert,” Eliot is also Founder and Artistic Director of Chamber Music at Rodeph Sholom in New York and Artistic Director of the New York Chamber Ensemble. Principal cello of the New Jersey Festival Orchestra, New York Chamber Ensemble, Orchestra New England, Teatro Grattacielo and the New Choral Society, Eliot has performed regularly with the Saratoga Chamber Players, Cape May Music Festival, Sebago-Long Lake Music Festival, Bronx Arts Ensemble as well as with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, New York City Opera and Ballet, Oratorio Society, American Symphony, Orchestra Lumos, New Jersey Symphony and numerous Broadway shows. Among Eliot’s commissions are an Octet, a Double Concerto for Flute and Cello, Perhaps a Butterfly, Saratoga Sextet, The Tiny Mustache (a musical) and recently a Dectet (“Inclusion”).
He is recipient of over fifty commissions for his “Song to Symphony” for schools (subject of a NY Times feature article Sept. 2006 and winner of a Yale Alumni Grant). In 2002 he received the Norman Vincent Peale Award for Positive Thinking. Eliot holds a DMA from Yale University and an M.B.A. from NYU. He is on the cello and chamber music faculty at Columbia University, Barnard College and Teachers College and Western CT State University.
He has performed at the SLLMF since 1994.
[2026]