Mandhira de Saram is a founding member and leader of the Ligeti Quartet, a string quartet who specialise in contemporary music in all its many guises. She is also a busy soloist – an improviser, chamber musician and collaborator, working across a variety of genres with musicians such as Jason Singh, Wadada Leo Smith, Trish Clowes, Ethan Iverson and Shabaka Hutchings. She has regular duos with Benoît Delbecq (with whom she recently released an album, Spinneret) and Steve Beresford, and is a member of TableMusic and Riot Ensemble. She has performed at prestigious venues such as the Wigmore Hall, Barbican Centre, Southbank Centre and St John’s Smith Square in London, and Carnegie Hall in New York, and has featured on BBC Radio 3 programmes such as In Tune, Music Matters, Jazz on 3, Hear and Now, and Late Junction.

Mandhira is currently a mentor for the Young Music Leadership Programme in association with the Royal Academy of Music and Kuumba Youth Music. As part of three Ligeti Quartet university residencies – Sheffield, Cambridge, and Goldsmiths (London) – she regularly teaches and leads workshops. She studied at the University of Oxford, graduating with an MA in music. Her violin teachers have included Igor Petrushevsky, Howard Davis and Levon Chilingirian, and she currently plays a 1735 Sanctus Seraphin violin kindly loaned to her by Derek Clements-Croome.