Bell maintains an avid interest in film music, commemorating the 20^th anniversary of The Red Violin (1998) in 2018-19. The film’s Academy-Award winning soundtrack features Bell as soloist; in 2018, Bell brings the film with live orchestra to summer festivals and the New York Philharmonic.

An exclusive Sony Classical artist, Bell has recorded over 40 albums garnering Grammy®, Mercury®, Gramophone and ECHO Klassik awards. Sony Classical’s June 2018 release, with Bell and the Academy, features Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy and G minor Violin Concerto.

In 2007, a Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post story, on Bell performing incognito in a Washington, D.C. metro station, sparked a conversation regarding artistic reception in context. It inspired Kathy Stinson’s 2013 children’s book, The Man With The Violin, and a newly-commissioned animated film. Bell debuted the 2017 Man With The Violin festival at the Kennedy Center, and, in March 2019, presents a Man With The Violin festival with the Seattle Symphony.

Born in Bloomington, Indiana, Bell began violin at age four, and at age twelve, began studies with Josef Gingold. At 14, Bell debuted with Riccardo Muti and the Philadelphia Orchestra, and debuted at Carnegie Hall at age 17 with the St. Louis Symphony. Bell received the 2007 Avery Fisher Prize and has been named Musical America’s 2010 “Instrumentalist of the Year” and an “Indiana Living Legend.”

Bell performs on the 1713 Huberman Stradivarius violin, with a François Tourte 18^th-Century bow.