Julia-Maria Kretz began her musical studies in 1989 at the age of nine with Marianne Boettcher at the Julius Stern Institute of the University of the Arts in Berlin. She then studied with Thomas Brandis at the Berlin University of the Arts and with Josef Suk in Prague. With her piano trio, the Julius Stern Trio, formed in 1996, she studied with Menahem Pressler, Niklas Schmidt, György Sebök and Georg Sava. She was winner of the Jugend musiziert Competition and is a fellow of the German National Scholarship Foundation and of PE Friends for Music Scholars. She received the Classic Prize from WDR and the Rauhe Prize from Hamburg in 2005. She is also first-prize winner of the Marie Luise Imbusch Competition, while her piano trio received the WDR Classic Prize and first prize of the 2004 Florence Premio Vittorio Gui, the Trio di Trieste in Trieste (2005), and the Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy Competition in Berlin (2005). As a soloist she has appeared with the Berlin and Nuremberg Symphony Orchestras, the Thessaloniki State Orchestra, and the Bad Reichenhall Philharmonic Orchestra. She also appears with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, of which she has been a member since 2001 and, working with Claudio Abbado, of the Lucerne Festival Orchestra since 2006. Julia-Maria Kretz performs on a violin by Joseph Nicola Gagliano, Naples, ca. 1791.