long_bio

Nikita Yermak is a violinist, violist, composer, producer, and teacher whose work moves between concert performance, theater, recording, electroacoustic music, and film. Across these different worlds, his artistic approach is driven by raw emotion, creative risk, and an interest in performance as something immediate, visceral, and alive.

He has appeared at venues including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, and the John F. Kennedy Center, and has performed alongside artists including Ólafur Arnalds, Gil Shaham, Maxim Vengerov, Alan Gilbert, Michel Legrand, Kent Nagano, Leila Josefowicz, and Daniel Caesar. His work has been heard on Warner Classics, Naxos, Albany Records, CBS, and NBC, spanning orchestral performance, contemporary chamber music, recording sessions, Broadway productions, and interdisciplinary collaborations.

Yermak is currently the Principal Violinist in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s immersive production Masquerade, work for which he received a Drama Desk Award as part of the production team. On Broadway, he has also performed in productions including The Lion King, Moulin Rouge, Sweeney Todd, Death Becomes Her, Gypsy, The Great Gatsby, and & Juliet. Beyond theater, he has performed with musicians from the New York Philharmonic, Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, and Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and serves as guest concertmaster in the NYC area.

In 2019, together with composer, producer, and pianist Danica Borisavljević, Yermak co-founded Vessels to Motherland, a New York–based electroacoustic duo and award-winning film-composition project known for a distinctive sound between industrial, ambient, psychedelic, classical, and avant-garde traditions. Their work includes concert performances, interdisciplinary collaborations, and original scores for film and visual media.

Alongside performing and composing, Yermak maintains an active teaching practice centered on listening, technical freedom, interpretive depth, and the development of an individual artistic voice. His writing and pedagogical work draw from classical training, recording practice, philosophy, psychology, and the realities of contemporary artistic life.

Born in Montreal, Yermak studied with the Turovsky family for sixteen years before completing degrees at the Université de Montréal and The Juilliard School, where he received the Naumburg and DePetris Scholarships. He later pursued doctoral studies at the CUNY Graduate Center under Rolf Schulte and Mark Steinberg.

His current projects include TQ+: Works for Solo Violin/Viola/+ by Trans/Queer/+ composers, a forthcoming recording dedicated to contemporary works for solo strings, alongside ongoing performance, recording, and collaborative projects across theater, concert music, and film.