Juan Felipe was born on 1993, in Ibagué - Colombia. He began his musical studies at the age of nine at the Amina Melendro de Pulecio Music School under the guidance of Olga Lucía Vidal. In 2010, he was admitted to doing a bachelor at the Conservatory del Tolima, where he studied with José de los Santos Pérez. From an early age, he received recognition in competitions such as Creativity, Talent and Youth (2008) and the Young Performers Competition at the Conservatorio del Tolima.
He has appeared as a soloist performing works by Wieniawski, Brahms, Bach, Mendelssohn, Vivaldi, Tchaikovsky and Beethoven, in stages in Colombia, Switzerland, Spain and Italy, and has been invited to several festivals like Virtuoso & Belcanto, Garda Lake Festival and Allegro Vivo, among others and masterclasses with renowned violinists including Maxim Vengerov, Augustin Hadelich, Pavel Vernikov, Vadim Gluzman, Boris Brovtsyn, Mark Steinberg, Pavel Berman, and Andreas Janke. He has been awarded several scholarships by the Salvi Foundation to be part of the Cartagena Music Festival.
Juan Felipe has had a career mainly in orchestras and as a pedagogue. He has performed with leading orchestras in Colombia including the Filarmónica Joven de Colombia, Filarmónica and Filarmónica Juvenil de Bogotá and Sinfónica de Colombia. In 2019, he joined the Sin Fronteras tour with the Filarmónica Joven de Colombia, performing in major European venues such as the Tonhalle Maag (Zurich), Musikverein (Vienna), and Alte Oper (Frankfurt). That same year, he was accepted into the master performance program at the Hochschule der Künste Bern.
During the years of studying in Switzerland, he was awarded the prestigious Hans und Gertrud Zender Foundation scholarship, in recognition of his performance as soloist and concertmaster with the Hochschüle der Künste Bern Orchestra. In 2022, he was awarded to do an internship with the Berner Symphonieorchester, and in 2023 with the Biel-Solothurn Symphonieorchester. He also earned in 2024 a position at the Grafenegg Academy in Austria.
In 2023, he was awarded third place at the Stockholm International Violin Competition and sixth place at the Mimas Music Festival. He completed two master’s degrees—in performance and pedagogy—at the Hochschule der Künste Bern (HKB) under the mentorship of Tianwa Yang. In 2024, he performed Mendelssohn’s Double Concerto for Violin and Piano as soloist alongside pianist Kirill Zvegintsov and the HKB Orchestra and the Berner Studentinnen- und Studenten Orchester under the baton of Simon Schmied. The same year he was a guest artist at the Ibagué Music Festival, where he gave several concerts and master classes.
As a pedagogue he has given different lessons for students in places such as Konsi Bern, Musikschule Biel, Musik-Akademie Basel among others, as well as Masterclasses for students at the Conservatorio del Tolima. And as a conductor he has done workshops in Chile with Rodolfo Fischer, besides having done a minor in band conducting at the Hochschule der Künste Bern with Rolf Schumacher, Corsin Tour and Florian Ziemen and at the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste, complementary conducting lessons with Christof Brunner.
He has already completed a Certificate of Advanced Studies (CAS) at the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste with the violinist Ralph Orendain and is a graduate of the 2025 class of the OAcademy, in the class of Nikki Chooi. He has also been appointed conductor of the Musikgesellschaft Laupen-Mühleberg band.
He performs on a 2000 violin crafted by the luthier Krzysztof Krupa.