Known for her deep musicality, fierce curiosity and her love for simplicity and directness, she has worked with leading conductors, including Sir Colin Davis, Charles Dutoit, Lorin Maazel, Yuri Temirkanov and Zubin Mehta with orchestras such as London Symphony Orchestra, the Bavarian State Orchestra, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the Israel Philharmonic, St Petersburg Philharmonic and New York Philharmonic.

Born in 1983 in Tokyo, Sayaka Shoji spent her childhood in Siena, Italy where she picked up the violin at age of 5, and later continued her study under Uto Ughi and Riccaldo Brengola at Accademia Musicale Chigiana in parallel to her study in Japan. Since '93 she took lessons by Sashko Gawrilloff and made her debut at the Lucerne Festival and the Musikverein, Vienna with the Festival Strings Lucerne and Rudolph Baumgartner in 1997, when she was fourteen years old.

Next year, she moved to Cologne, Germany to study under Zakhar Bron and rose to international attention when in 1999 she became the first Japanese and the youngest violinist to win first prize at the prestigious Paganini International Violin Competition, in Genoa, Italy.

Recently she has appeared with the IPO under Ivan Fischer in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, NHK Symphony under Sir Roger Norrington performing Beethoven Concerto with her own Cadenza, and a gala concert with Kurt Masur for his Mendelssohn foundation, as well as a European tour with the St Petersburg Philharmonic and Yuri Termirkanov, followed by an extensive tour with the Santa Cecilia Orchestra and Antonio Pappano.

Highlights of the 07/08 season included a return to the London Symphony Orchestra with Maestro Temirkanov, her debut with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and Paavo Jarvi and a re-invitation to the Salle Pleyel to perform the Stravinsky Concerto with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France and Myung-Whun Chung, with whom she also performed with La Scala Philharmonic in the end of the season.

Besides concerto performances, she appears regularly as a recitalist and a chamber musician at the festivals such as Verbier, Schleswig-Holstein, Evian, Fetes Musicales en Touraine, and la Folle Journee.

After graduating from Musikhochschule in Cologne in '04, Sayaka Shoji currently based in Paris, and performs on the "Joachim" Stradivarius (1715) generously provided by the Nippon Music Foundation.

She records for Deutsche Grammophone.