We recently connected with Mia Rose Nardi-Huffman and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Mia Rose thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Let’s jump to the end – what do you want to be remembered for?
When I was 31 years old, my husband Ryan passed away from a very rare primary brain tumor that he had been fighting for 3 years, and it completely changed the trajectory of my life. Prior to me becoming a young widow, I had built a successful performing career as a classical violinist in a string quartet called ASTRAEUS in the San Francisco Bay Area, and had a large private studio of violin students.
Walking alongside my husband when he got sick and ultimately passed away made me re-examine what I was doing with my life and why. ASTRAEUS had suffered, as many arts organizations and ensembles did, during COVID, and I ultimately decided to restart my life on the East Coast, in New York City. The ideas that I had for my future before Ryan got sick were fairly straightforward: have children, teach a lot, perform, be a good wife etc. But when I was widowed, I was given a blank slate, which initially felt incredibly overwhelming.
Ultimately, I rebranded ASTRAEUS from a string quartet into a chamber music collective, and have started putting on multidisciplinary performances in the New York area, which feels close to my heart as I have long loved combining music with dance, visual art, multimedia etc. I also wrote my first book, titled ‘So I Don’t Forget’, which is an autobiographical collection of poetry about grief and reinvention, due out this Fall. I realized that when Ryan was diagnosed, I could barely find other young people in my situation online, and I was very comforted in particular by reading Nora McInerny’s writing about her own experience as a young widow.
When I think about the legacy I want to build, it now involves building a community for young widows and offering writing that they can relate to and feel comfort from. It also includes my work as a violinist, which has been an exceptionally therapeutic way for me to work through my grief, as well as to bolster the creative community that I now live in, in Brooklyn, NY. Forming friendships through artistic collaboration and being able to offer accessible, exciting chamber music programs for people here is the kind of legacy that I wish to leave behind.
I would hope that people will say that I was bold- that I didn’t let the bad things that have happened to me stop me from living life fully. Aging is a privilege that not all of us are given, and I choose to make the most out of the time that I have by investing in the communities that have held me and supported me through the most difficult time in my life.
Mia Rose, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
My name is Mia Nardi-Huffman, and I am a 32-year-old violinist and poet, who also happens to be a young widow.
I am the founder and first violinist of the ASTRAEUS Chamber Collective (@astraeus_collective), which offers engaging, accessible concerts in unusual spaces throughout the New York Metropolitan Area. ASTRAEUS focuses primarily on living composers and typically involves multidisciplinary performances including dance, live art, and more. We were formerly based in California, but just had our East Coast debut show on July 28th where we presented string quartet works based on the four elements of nature alongside Brooklyn-based artist Organic Decline, who live-painted a vintage garment in a statement about fast fashion’s impact on the environment.
As a classically-trained violinist, I’ve performed all over the world in spaces ranging from intimate living rooms to stadiums with tens of thousands of audience members. I also perform and tour with bands- I’ll be on a short US/Canada tour with Spirit Mother this September!
I was technically first published as a poet when I was 9 years old, in Skipping Stones Magazine. That continued into emo poetry that I published on my somewhat popular Tumblr blog in college, and then stopped for a while until I was widowed in 2022. After losing my husband, writing was one of the only things that truly made my head stop spinning, and I completed the poetry for my first book, ‘So I Don’t Forget’, about a month ago. The book is in collaboration with my dear friend Julia Frazer, who is doing all of the illustrations, and will be out this Fall in both print and digital formats.
I am terminally online for better or worse, and can be found at @miarosenh on Instagram for those who would like to see what weird outfits I’ve got on, show announcements for ASTRAEUS or sneak previews of my forthcoming book.
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
I was kind of a weird kid growing up (I was the girl who would prefer to listen to Beethoven and write sad poetry instead of playing field hockey in suburban Connecticut…an unpopular choice apparently), and the first time that I found a community that felt like home was when I went to a music summer program and met other people that loved the violin.
Through music school and beyond, I have always felt the most myself and the most authentic around other people who create, whether it is music, writing, film, painting, tattooing, etc. That sense of community also feels really powerful when you are playing for an audience and get to share without even using words. It’s often much easier for me to communicate through music than it is through conversation (thank you social anxiety!), and feeding off of the crowd’s reaction creates an entirely new aspect to the performance that doesn’t exist inside the confines of a practice room.
As the founder of ASTRAEUS, I’ve been fortunate to connect with lots of creatives here in Brooklyn and the NYC Metropolitan Area, and with our shows, we are trying to keep DIY performances active and accessible to a wide variety of people.
We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
I remember very distinctly the first time that I cried after ‘messing up’ a performance as a young violinist. I couldn’t have been more than 13 years old at the time, and already I had a perfectionist mindset where I was placing an insane amount of pressure on myself. After the performance, I was crying backstage and a teacher at the time told me to ‘go to the bathroom, wipe the tears off, smile, and thank your audience for coming. They can never see you cry.’
I was just a kid! That perfectionism unfortunately continued well into adolescence, where I struggled with an eating disorder and continued to put a lot of pressure on myself as a musician and overwork to achieve this ideal that I had in my head of the perfect violinist. I worked myself to the point of injury and ultimately had to have a cyst removed from my wrist in graduate school, before I even hit 25 years old. At the time the doctor told me to take 72 hours off from playing; I was concertmaster of my conservatory’s orchestra at the time, and went back to playing before even two days had passed to not lose my seat. I still have the scar tissue.
Eventually, thanks to therapy and some incredibly wonderful violin mentors, I have been able to let go of the idea that I need to be perfect in order to be worthy. Nowadays I am thinking about how I can communicate best with an audience when I play, rather than if 100% of the notes go the way that I want. Not only am I way more confident on stage as a result, I also enjoy what I do much more.
Contact Info:
- Website: mianardihuffman.com
- Instagram: @miarosenh
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mia-nardi-huffman-882968273
- Yelp: https://www.yelp.com/biz/mia-nardi-huffman-brooklyn-3
Image Credits
Ryan Bealer, Photographer