Drew Dansby (he/him/his), 24, is cellist of the award-winning Poiesis Quartet and is the youngest tenured member of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. With the Poiesis Quartet, Drew won first prize at the 2025 Banff International String Quartet Competition and Grand Prize at the 2023 Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition. Before joining the Cincinnati cello section in 2024, Drew previously served as principal cellist of the Verbier Festival Orchestra, acting section cellist in the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra, and associate principal cellist of the New York String Orchestra.

Originally from Charlotte, North Carolina, Drew began playing both violin and cello at the age of 4 and continue to perform on both instruments. He was a member of the National Youth Orchestra of the United States for three international summer tours, including as violinist in 2018 and principal cellist in 2019, and was recognized as the first person in the history of the orchestra to be accepted on two instruments. Drew’s first orchestral experience was in the Charlotte Symphony Youth Orchestras, in which he switched each year between violin and cello for ten years. Drew is also the cellist and founding member of the Charlotte Piano Trio, which has performed for six years across the Carolinas.

Besides his orchestral and chamber experience, Drew is also accomplished as a soloist. He was a winner of Oberlin’s Concerto Competition and became the first-ever winner to solo with jazz ensemble, with David Baker’s Concerto for Cello and Jazz Band. Drew made his solo debut with the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra at age 15, and a few months later performed the first movement of Dvorak’s Cello Concerto as a winner of the Eastern Music Festival Concerto Competition, for which the Cultural Voice of North Carolina noted “[Dansby] dominated the piece and delivered it with power and emotion.” At 16, he appeared on a recital with pianist Keona Lim-Rose on the Davidson College Concert Series. At Oberlin, Drew performed as a violin soloist on Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso No. 1 with Jasper de Boor and the Musikos Chamber Orchestra. Drew has been recognized as a National YoungArts Winner and a gold medalist in the Cleveland Cello Society competition.

Drew is committed to using music as a tool for community building, especially through long-term educational engagement. Drew is an active cello teacher, and for two years he taught for Through the Staff, a national volunteer organization expanding access for young people to private music instruction. In the summer of 2022, he founded and directed the Myers Park Summer Series, a free series of six innovative chamber music concerts fundraising for mutual aid organization Feed the Movement CLT, featuring 18 musicians from western North Carolina including Charlotte-based R&B artist Nia J. During his time in the Charlotte Symphony, Drew was a volunteer coordinator for the symphony’s after-school strings program, Project Harmony. At Oberlin, Drew was a co-founder of Ambrosia, an initiative for students of jazz, classical, and non-Western genres to collaborate and share knowledge. In high school, Drew served as Artistic Director of Melodic Minors, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, coordinating volunteer musicians and repertoire for over 30 concerts at nursing homes, hospitals, after-school programs, and fundraisers.

As a chemistry major at Oberlin, Drew conducted molecular dynamics and computational chemistry research under Professors Manish Mehta and Shuming Chen, and he was awarded the Norman C. Craig Chemistry Scholarship and inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa honors society as a member of the junior class. Drew has also interned as an air quality analyst at the Charlotte branch of Civil and Environmental Consultants and conducted atmospheric chemistry research with Dr. Terry Miller at The Ohio State University.

Drew graduated in 2024 with a B.M. in Cello Performance under Darrett Adkins and a B.A. in Chemistry with minors in Sociology and Comparative American Studies from Oberlin College and Conservatory. He is currently pursuing an Artist Diploma from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, studying under Ariel Quartet cellist Amit-Even Tov.

Drew performs on a 1983 Mario Gadda Mantua cello.