Violinist Colin Jacobsen is one of a pair of musically innovative brothers who have co-founded and worked together in the musically innovative New York ensembles Brooklyn Rider and The Knights. He and his brother Eric have also performed with Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Ensemble. Colin Jacobsen has also extended his activities into composition, often influenced by world music traditions.

Colin Jacobsen was born in the New York area in 1978. He and Eric are the children of Eddie Jacobsen, a Metropolitan Opera Orchestra violinist, and Ivy Jacobsen, a flutist who died in an auto crash when both boys were young. Colin Jacobsen studied at the Juilliard School in New York and the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, Netherlands. He joined the Silk Road Ensemble at its founding in 2000, appearing with the group at such landmark concerts as one in front of the world’s largest wooden Buddha statue in Nara, Japan, and another at the Red Fort in Agra, India. Jacobsen was awarded an Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2003. As a soloist in concerto repertory, he has performed with the New York Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony. He has given the world premieres of violin concertos by Lisa Bielawa and Kevin Beavers. The two brothers founded Brooklyn Rider in 2005; the eclectic group has made acclaimed genre-crossing recordings and has collaborated with performers and composers ranging from Philip Glass and Osvaldo Golijov to from singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega, banjoist Béla Fleck, and Chinese pipa virtuoso Wu Man. The brothers later founded the chamber orchestra The Knights, which was signed to the Sony label and has issued several albums, including an all-Beethoven program.

Colin Jacobsen, as a composer, has contributed to the repertoires of both Brooklyn Rider and The Knights; for Brooklyn Rider, he wrote the popular Brooklyn tribute Brooklesca. He has performed the Brahms Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 77, with his brother conducting the Bridgeport Symphony Orchestra. In 2019, he performed on a recording of Bielawa's My Outstretched Hand with The Knights, conducted by Eric Jacobsen. He is a recipient of the prestigious United States Artists Fellowship. ~ James Manheim, Rovi