Originally from Palo Alto, California, Yael Cohen currently resides in New York City as a trumpet phenom pursuing an emerging career as a soloist and orchestral musician while also engaging with her studies as a third-year student at Columbia University studying Psychology and Information Science. She is twenty-one years old and has been playing trumpet for eleven years under the tutelage of Richard Roper, Raymond Mase, and David Krauss. Yael is an award-winning musician who made her soloist debut at Carnegie Hall with the New York Youth Symphony in 2019, and was a finalist of the 2016 International Trumpet Guild’s Solo Competition for the undergraduate division as a junior in high school. Furthermore, she has toured internationally with a myriad of orchestras, and she has experience playing in diverse musical settings across all genres. She is currently the principal trumpet player for the New York Youth Symphony and the Columbia University Orchestra. Additionally, Yael was a founding member of the San Francisco branch of the Back to Bach Project in its emancipation in 2015, she founded the Upper-Manhattan branch in 2018, and she is currently serving as a director of global operations for Back to Bach. She is working towards expanding Back to Bach’s offerings with supplementary programming, and is excited to be making vast strides to keep classical music beloved and relevant, act as an ambassador for female brass players to children worldwide, and instigate palpable change in school districts with critically underfunded music programs.