Cellist Starla Breshears, age 16, is a precollege student and a recipient of a Joseph Chan Full Scholarship at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, studying cello with Jean-Michel Fonteneau. Starla has been coached by Christine Walevska and Sergei Riabtchenko and has performed for master classes with Sheku Kanneh-Mason, Alisa Weilerstein, and Amit Peled. Since the age of 6, she has soloed with 14 orchestras, including the California Youth Symphony, Kalamazoo Junior Symphony, Palo Alto Philharmonic, Symphony Parnassus, and the Nova Vista Symphony. Starla was the 2023 Stulberg International String Competition Bronze Medalist and has also won first prize in more than a dozen solo competitions, such as first place ASTA State Solo Competition, first place Pacific Musical Society & Foundation Competition, and grand prize in the Diablo Valley College/Holy Names University Young Artist Competition. Starla’s sibling string quartet, the Breshears Quartet, has been featured twice on the Violin Channel as Rising Star of the Week and on From the Top. The quartet won first prize in the 2023 Piero Farulli International Competition for Young String Quartets, and as winners they recently gave several concerts in Italy. As one of the youngest Beares International Violin Society Young Artists, Starla was the loan recipient of a half-size nineteenth-century Hill cello and a three-quarters-size 1808 Lorenzo Ventapane. She was a Yellow Barn Young Artist in 2022 and 2023.