Percussionist and Educator
About
Originally from Chicago, Illinois, Nupur Thakkar is a percussionist and educator based in Nashville, Tennessee.
Nupur is an active teacher with experience working with students of all levels, from beginners to advanced performers. She has served on the faculty of the Interlochen Arts Camp and Interlochen Percussion Intensive for the past four years, where she has led masterclasses, coached chamber music, and worked closely with high school percussionists in both large and small ensemble settings. She has also taught at the Peabody Preparatory and worked with students across several schools in Nashville, offering both private lessons and chamber music coaching.
In addition to her institutional teaching, Nupur runs a private percussion studio, where she focuses on building strong technical foundations, musical confidence, and a supportive learning environment tailored to each student’s goals.
As a performer, Nupur has a strong background in chamber music and contemporary performance. She has performed with ensembles including the Contemporary Music Ensemble, Peabody Percussion Group, Vanderbilt Percussion Group, and Roy Wooten’s New Village Orchestra, with appearances at venues such as Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall. She has also premiered works by composers including Forrest Pierce and Keeghan Fountain.
In 2024, she participated in a three-day residency at the Oberlin Conservatory as part of the Oberlin Chamber Music Initiative, focusing on rehearsing, filming, pedagogical tool-building, and performance. While at Vanderbilt, she founded The Merge Ensemble, a strings and percussion collective that collaborated with multimedia artists to create interdisciplinary performances.These experiences inform her teaching, shaping a collaborative and creative approach to music-making in her work with students.
Over the past few years she has attended the Yellowbarn Young artist program, soundSCAPE, Cortona Sessions for New Music, Sandbox Percussion Seminar, So Percussion Collaborative Workshop, Northwestern Percussion Symposium, and spent a few months in India studying tabla with Guruji Narendra Gangani.