Sruti Sarathy

Sruti Sarathy is a leading Carnatic musician known for her soulful sound and imaginative approach to the Indian violin. Born and raised in the Bay Area, she began her musical training as a prodigious three-year-old under Guru Anuradha Sridhar, a sixth-generation violinist from the eminent Lalgudi lineage of musicians. She regularly accompanies leading Carnatic musicians including Flute Shashank, T. M. Krishna, Sikkil Gurucharan, and Sudha Raghunathan, and has received awards from the Music Academy, Madras three years in a row for her performances. She has also trained in Hindustani music under violin maestro Kala Ramnath. Her other honors include the Mysore T. Chowdiah Memorial Award for outstanding violinist from the Cleveland Thyagaraja Aradhana in 2023 and the Rukmini Rajagopalan Memorial Award from Shruti Swara Laya in 2024. Sruti co-leads Unfretted, an Indian strings duet with chitravina player Vishaal Sapuram, and is the creator and lead composer of Songs for Many Lives, which tells stories of the South Asian diaspora through new Carnatic compositions. She received a Fulbright Scholarship in 2016 from the US Department of State to study cross-genre approaches in Carnatic violin, and has been an artist-in-residence at Yaddo, Hedgebrook, OneBeat, Montalvo Arts Center, and Emory University. She is a graduate of Stanford University, where she studied French literature.