Vita

Johanna-Leonore Dahlhoff is a flutist, composer, and cultural entrepreneur based in Frankfurt am Main. A central concern for her is to combine her artistic work with social responsibility. In 2019, she co-founded the transcultural Bridges Chamber Orchestra with Anke Karen Meyer, where she still serves as managing director, artistic director, and flutist.

Since 2016, she had already been the artistic director of the intercultural music initiative Bridges – Music Connects, from which the Bridges Chamber Orchestra emerged. The initiative brings together musicians with and without refugee and migration backgrounds, as well as musical styles from around the world. Through this work, she has gained national recognition in Germany and serves as a role model.

Within five years, Johanna-Leonore Dahlhoff led the Bridges Chamber Orchestra to become one of the leading transcultural orchestras in Germany. The orchestra performs at prestigious venues such as the Casals Forum Kronberg, the Alte Oper Frankfurt, and the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, and appears at festivals such as the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival, the Bach Festival Leipzig, and many others. It has received numerous awards and was included in the Federal Program for Excellent Orchestra Landscapes in Germany in 2024.

In addition to her leadership role with the Bridges Chamber Orchestra, Johanna-Leonore Dahlhoff works as a freelance flutist, composer, and arranger. Her work focuses on cross-genre music projects, improvisation, composition, and orchestral arrangements.

Her composition Ambivalencia (2022) was performed in 2024 at the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg as part of the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival under the baton of Nil Venditti. Her Concertino for Chamber Orchestra, composed in 2023, was released in 2024 on the Bridges Chamber Orchestra’s CD Complementarity, conducted by Harish Shankar.

Johanna-Leonore Dahlhoff was born in 1982 in Hanover to a family of musicians and studied flute with Prof. Hans-Udo Heinzmann (Hamburg) and Prof. Andrea Lieberknecht (Hanover). She also studied music therapy at the University of the Arts Berlin and at the Free Music Center in Munich.

For her work with the Bridges Chamber Orchestra, she has received numerous awards, including the Frankfurt and Hessian Integration Awards (2022), the German Record Critics’ Award (2021), and the Social Impact Award for innovative social entrepreneurship (2018).

As a flutist, she was awarded first prize at the Elise Meyer Competition in Hamburg and the national Jugend musiziertcompetition. During her studies, she received scholarships from the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes and the DAAD.

Concert tours have taken her to most EU countries, as well as to Argentina, Brazil, Japan, Madagascar, Mauritius, Russia, Switzerland, South Africa, the USA, and Uzbekistan. She has performed as a flutist with the European Union Youth Orchestra (EUYO), the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival Orchestra, the Pacific Music Festival Orchestra Sapporo (Japan), Festival Classik’Art (Madagascar), and the KlangVerwaltung (Munich), and spent several years as principal flutist of the Academy Orchestra of the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes.

From 2012 to 2022, she performed numerous concerts for children and babies as part of the duo ELVENHAIN, and recorded two CDs with the ensemble. She has also worked as a lecturer for aspiring music educators, advanced amateurs, and children from financially disadvantaged backgrounds in Mauritius, Madagascar, and Argentina.

More information:
www.bridges-kammerorchester.de