Grammy-nominated musician and composer, Anoushka Shankar is a masterful sitarist and a prolific recording artist with a ground-breaking international career. She has trod new paths in a wide range of musical genres including world, classical, electronic and jazz music. At the age of eighteen she was the youngest and first female recipient of a British House of Commons Shield, the first Indian woman to receive eleven nominations, perform and serve as a presenter at the Grammy® Awards and the first Indian woman to receive an Ivor Novello Awards nomination for film composition for her soundtrack to A Suitable Boy. She is also an Honorary Member of the Royal Academy of Music, one of the first five female composers to be featured in the UK’s A-level music syllabus and the recipient of an Honorary Doctorate in Music from the University of Oxford. From the age of nine, she studied the sitar and Indian classical music with her father, Pandit Ravi Shankar, learning by ear not only ancient musical traditions passed on through generations but also the spirit of improvisation for which her father was so renowned. Her love for musical connections across borders has led to numerous collaborations with a diverse range of international artists including Herbie Hancock, her half-sister Norah Jones, Patti Smith, Sting, Jacob Collier, Joshua Bell, Arooj Aftab, Nils Frahm, M.I.A, Rodrigo y Gabriela and His Holiness The Dalai Lama. She has also appeared as a soloist with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Metropole Orkest and the New York Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta. Her touring career has taken her to venerable concert halls, legendary jazz cafes and major festival stages to audiences of 40,000 people. Anoushka Shankar is currently the creative director of the Brighton Festival. In 2025 she marked her 30 years of stage performances with the release of We return to Light, the third chapter of her trilogy of mini albums. In the same year she gave the world premiere of her new work ‘Chapters’ at the BBC Proms with the London Contemporary Orchestra.