Performer, curator and on-stage host, James Austin Smith “proves an oboist can have an adventurous solo career” (The New Yorker). Praised for his “virtuosic,” “dazzling,” and “brilliant” performances (New York Times), Smith appears regularly at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in New York City and at leading national and international chamber music festivals, at Carnegie Hall and on tour as Co-Principal Oboe of the conductor-less Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and as an artist of the International Contemporary Ensemble. 

As Artistic and Executive Director of Tertulia Chamber Music Smith creates intimate evenings of food, drink, and music designed to engage audiences hungry for singular cultural experiences in New York and San Francisco, as well as an annual weekend festival of food and music in a variety of global destinations. He serves as Artistic Advisor to Coast Live Music, a new home for chamber music in the San Francisco Bay Area. He mentors graduate-level musicians as a professor of oboe and chamber music at Stony Brook University and as a regular guest at London's Guildhall School of Music and Drama. 

The 2026-2027 season brings Smith’s Carnegie Hall recital debut in a program entitled Elemental. Weaving works inspired by global double reed traditions with 20th Century masterpieces by Britten and Haas and newly commissioned music of Kian Ravaei and Zosha di Castri, the program asserts the instrument’s elemental role in the human soundscape. Additional performances include the Marcello Oboe Concerto at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, a recital in Boston with pianist Henry Kramer, a return to the Chamber Music Society of Palm Beach and the Tucson Chamber Music Festival, Tertulia’s fourth annual festival of music and food, this year in Montréal, and tours of the US West Coast and Europe with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra.

In the fall of 2023 Smith presented Hearing Memory, an evening of performance, story-telling and archival film footage documenting a clutch of politically engaged musicians in the former East Germany. Describing the event in the New Yorker, Alex Ross wrote, “no less virtuosic was Smith’s running commentary on the East German context. His deployment of videos, including some of musical discussions that he had found in television archives, gave the evening the feeling of a live documentary. For any young performer seeking an alternative to the usual walk-out-and-play routines, this impeccable event could serve as a model.” 

James Austin Smith holds a master’s degree from the Yale School of Music and bachelor’s degrees in political science and music from Northwestern University. He spent a year as a Fulbright Scholar at the Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy Conservatory in Leipzig, Germany, and is an alum of Carnegie Hall’s Ensemble Connect. Born in New York and raised in Connecticut, Smith’s principal teachers are Stephen Taylor, Christian Wetzel, Humbert Lucarelli, and Ray Still.