Joel Cohen, Music Director Emeritus of the Boston Camerata,  is a leading authority in the field of medieval, Renaissance,  and early American  musical performance. He has received widespread acclaim as performer, conductor, and writer/commentator in his chosen field, and his unique style of program building  has made the  Camerata ensemble famous on five continents.

Mr. Cohen studied composition at Harvard University. Awarded a Danforth Fellowship, he spent the next two years in Paris as a student of Nadia Boulanger. He has taught and lectured at many East Coast universities, including Harvard, Yale, Brandeis, and Amherst. Abroad, he has given seminars and workshops at the Schola Cantorum in Basel, at the Royal Opera of Brussels, in Spain, Singapore, and Japan. During the fall semester of 2007 he was Distinguished Artist in Residence at the University of Tennessee,  Knoxville. His professional honors include membership in Phi Beta Kappa, the Erwin Bodky Award in early music, the Signet Society medal from Harvard, the Georges Longy Achievement Award and the Howard Mayer Brown Award for lifetime achievement in early music. He is an Officer of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of the French Republic.

As lutenist, Mr. Cohen has appeared with numerous European ensembles. He was a frequent accompanist to tenor Hugues Cuénod. More recently, his duo recitals with soprano Anne Azéma have taken him to many parts of Europe, Africa, and Asia. His conducting appearances include two seasons at the Brussels opera, as well as invitations to the Aix-en-Provence Festival (1989) and the Tanglewood Festival (1992, 1994, 1995). He was Artist in Residence in the Netherlands in 2000, the first American musician to receive such an appointment.

Mr. Cohen's chosen repertoires span many centuries and countries, and over thirty LP-CD programs have been recorded under his direction, for Nonesuch, Telefunken, Harmonia Mundi, Erato, and other labels. Over the years he has taken a special interest in French music of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, and early Baroque. In 1989, his recording of Tristan et Iseult , based on original medieval sources, won the Grand Prix du Disque of the Académie Charles Cros, Paris. In early 1993, his recording of the Requiem by seventeenth-century Provençal composer Jean Gilles, realised at the Aix-en-Provence festival, was enthusiastically received by the French press and public.

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