Maeve Sullivan is an expressive saxophonist and multi-instrumentalist with a wide range of musical experiences in jazz and improvised music. Her first major performances were a series of international concerts with Youth Music Abroad in 2018, where she performed classics from the American jazz repertoire on tenor saxophone and clarinet with the jazz band, as well as European marches and folk music on clarinet with the wind band. The ensembles featured performances in Barcelona, Avignon, Monaco, Freiburg, and Paris. Since then, she has performed around the East Coast with a variety of other freelance musicians, having shared the stage with notable improvisers such as John Swana, Tim Warfield, Scott Edmunds, and Steve Fieldhouse. Along with freelance work, she currently leads the Maeve Sullivan Quartet, a collective of young improvisers based in West Chester, Pennsylvania

Having grown up in York, Pennsylvania, Maeve had a wide range of musical and cultural influences. Central Pennsylvania has a prominent jazz scene, and Maeve was performing her first gigs at 14. Throughout her youth, she was well-connected to the Central PA Friends of Jazz organization. She attended the camps at Messiah University as a teenager and received close education from guests such as Tim Warfield and Stefon Harris. In addition to her interest in improvisatory music, she grew up listening to several contemporary genres like progressive rock and pop punk from her family; she has also more recently found a deep love and appreciation for many styles of “classical” music, as well as Irish folk music. Maeve earned her Bachelor of Music in Jazz Performance at West Chester University in May of 2024. She began her studies in saxophone and improvisation with Jonathan Ragonese in 2020; while at the university, she also had opportunities to learn from Jeremy Jordan, Peter Paulsen, John Swana, Dan Cherry, and Marc Jacoby. Through her education, she has intensely studied and performed the music of Bob Curnow, Nicholas Payton, Dick Oatts, Alex LoRe, and Bob Mintzer, among others.

Boundlessly witty both on and off the stage, Maeve evokes the joys and complexities of her unique upbringing through her musical voice. She is an advocate for women’s representation and excellence in the arts, and she hopes that her work helps to create opportunities for, and inspire, more young women to pursue music and share their artistic voices, especially in the world of improvised music. When she is not performing or writing music, she loves to read – to her, the improviser and the novelist are like-practitioners whose defining difference is the language they use to dictate their stories. She also enjoys brewing her own beer and wine, learning about the world’s many languages, and spending time making all kinds of entertainment and memories with her loved ones.