Praised for his “virtuosic,” “dazzling,” and “brilliant” performances (New York Times), James Austin Smith appears regularly at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center in New York City and at leading national and international chamber music festivals, at Carnegie Hall and on tour as Co-Principal Oboe of the conductor-less Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, and as an artist of the International Contemporary Ensemble. 

As Artistic and Executive Director of Tertulia Chamber Music Smith creates intimate evenings of food, drink, and music designed to engage audiences hungry for singular cultural experiences in New York, San Francisco and Serenbe, Georgia, as well as an annual weekend festival of food and music in a variety of global destinations. He serves as Artistic Advisor to Coast Live Music, a new home for chamber music in the San Francisco Bay Area. He mentors graduate-level musicians as a professor of oboe and chamber music at Stony Brook University and as a regular guest at London's Guildhall School of Music and Drama. 

In the fall of 2023 Smith presented Hearing Memory, an evening of performance, story-telling and archival film footage documenting a clutch of politically engaged musicians in the former East Germany. Describing the event in the New Yorker, Alex Ross wrote, “no less virtuosic was Smith’s running commentary on the East German context. His deployment of videos, including some of musical discussions that he had found in television archives, gave the evening the feeling of a live documentary. For any young performer seeking an alternative to the usual walk-out-and-play routines, this impeccable event could serve as a model.” 

In 2025 Smith tours around the country with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, curates programs in Newport and Washington, D.C., and brings his musical-historical project Hearing Memory to Leipzig, Dresden and Cologne, Germany. He presents a weekend festival of music and food in Istanbul with Tertulia Chamber Music, as well as a slate of specially-curated events in New York, San Francisco and Serenbe, Georgia. He advises Coast Live Music on a series of performances in Silicon Valley; summer festival appearances include Bay Chamber Concerts, Music@Menlo and the Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festivals.

James Austin Smith holds a master’s degree from the Yale School of Music and bachelor’s degrees in political science and music from Northwestern University. He spent a year as a Fulbright Scholar at the Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy Conservatory in Leipzig, Germany, and is an alum of Carnegie Hall’s Ensemble Connect. Born in New York and raised in Connecticut, Smith’s principal teachers are Stephen Taylor, Christian Wetzel, Humbert Lucarelli, and Ray Still.