Barbara Bogatin has been a member of the San Francisco Symphony since 1994. She began her cello studies at the New School of Music in Philadelphia, continued at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Preparatory Division, and earned Bachelor and Master of Music degrees from The Juilliard School.

Before joining the San Francisco Symphony, her varied career included playing with New York Chamber Soloists and the Riverside String Quartet, substituting with the New York Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, playing in the Monte Carlo Show, the Casals Festival, and as principal cellist with Milwaukee and New Jersey Symphony Orchestras. She has performed and recorded on Baroque cello and viola da gamba with Aston Magna, the Amati Trio, Connecticut Early Music Festival and New York’s Classical Band. An avid chamber musician, Barbara has played with Chamber Music Northwest, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Tiburon Chamber Players, SF Symphony Davies Hall Chamber Music Series, Music at Kohl Mansion, Classical Tahoe Music Festival, the Lucerne Festival, and on cruise ships in the Baltic Sea and the Middle East.

With her husband, neuroscientist Clifford Saron, she has led workshops called “The Buddha, the Brain, and Bach,” that explore the intersection of contemplative practice, creative process, and neuroplasticity at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, the Esalen Institute, Stanford Symposium for Music and the Brain, Telluride Compassion Festival, University of Southern California Center for Mindfulness Science, South Africa Conference on Mindfulness, the Ecology of Mind and Matter Symposium in Todi, Italy, the Nirakara Institute in Madrid, Spain, and the University of the Balearic Islands in Mallorca. She is a proud mother of two University of California graduates who now work in environmental science and the law.