Brooklyn based clarinetist and composer Michael Winograd is one of the leading voices in Jewish music today. He is the front person of the klezmer supergroup The Honorable Mentshn, with whom he has performed across the world. He cofounded the genre-bending, culture collisionist band Sandaraa with Pakistani sensation Zeb Bangash. He has performed with a veritable who’s who of today’s most celebrated performers of Klezmer and Yiddish music, and his original music has been featured in major motion pictures, television, theater and dance.

2025 continues to be an exciting year. Following a seventeen month run as a cast member and musician in the tony award winning Cabaret at the KitKat Club on Broadway, Michael prepared for the release of his newest album, TANZ! Live in New York City, with performances at the Jewish Culture Festival in Poland, the Yidstock Festival and KlezKanada (the world’s largest hub for Yiddish Music transmission, where Michael was director from 2016-2021.) Michael also joined up for a sold out performance at NYC’s Madison Square Garden with internet funk sensations Vulfpeck.

Michael has performed with Itzhak Perlman, the Klezmer Conservatory Band, the Klezmatics, SoCalled, the Painted Bird, Debbie Friedman, Adrienne Cooper, Budowtiz, Alicia Svigals, Frank London and many more of your favorite Klezmer stars. He was a member of the Yiddish Art Trio, the Tarras Band, and the Pneuma Quartet, He is a celebrated album producer, and has released over a dozen of his own including Early Bird Special (2022,) Kosher Style (2019,) Storm Game (2012,) Bessarabian Hop (2008,) and coming in 2025 TANZ! Live in New York City, He has been featured on dozens of albums as a collaborator including Vulfpeck’s The Beautiful Game (2016), Live at Madison Square Garden (2020), Here we Go Jack (2022,) and Klezmer, Klezmer, Klezmer (2023,) with Socalled and Vulfpeck’s Jack Stratton.

Michael Co-scored the 2022 feature film iMordecai (starring Judd Hirsch, Sean Astin and Carol Kane,) the 2024 short film Unravelled, and had original music featured in HBO’s And Just LIke That, and on The Late Show with Steven Colbert. He was the orchestrator for Amid Falling Walls (2023,), a new musical at the Folksbiene National Yiddish Theater in New York City. Michael was the recipient of the prestigious United States Artists Fellowship in 2024, and has been awarded grants, commissions and fellowships from The Map Fund, Chamber Music America and New York Foundation for the Arts. Michael was the artistic director of KlezKanada from 2016-2021, and was a founder of Yiddish New York, starting in 2015.