Known in Birmingham, Alabama as the Cello guy, Craig Hultgren devotes his artistic pursuits to contemporary composers and free-styled improvisations.

Cellist Craig Hultgren is an activist for new music, the newly creative arts, and the avant-garde. Possessing a broad range of instrumental techniques from traditional to radical, he has commissioned over fifty new works for the cello. Through his collaborations with living composers, he is changing the way people write for and listen to the instrument. Besides playing written compositions, Hultgren also performs his own spontaneous, free-style improvisations. He presents programs of new music throughout the country and abroad. His performances have been broadcast on National Public Radio's Performance Today, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and European radio. The Birmingham News said of him, "Hultgren...pushes the limits of his instrument brilliantly by using extended techniques in fascinating ways."

Hultgren has solo CD recordings on Minnesota-based Innova Recordings and Contemplative Outreach Birmingham. His third solo recording, The Electro-Acoustic Cello Book, featuring new music for cello and electronics was released on Living Artist Recordings. In the last decade, the Alabama State Council on the Arts has awarded him two individual Artist Fellowships. He is a member of Thamyris, a contemporary chamber music ensemble in Atlanta, the Chagall Trio, a piano trio in Birmingham, and Luna Nova, the ensemble of the Associated Colleges of the South.

As a traditionally trained artist, Hultgren possesses music degrees in performance from the University of Iowa where he was graduated with distinction and honors and from Indiana University, the world's largest school of music. He plays in the Alabama Symphony and has served as principal cellist with the National Symphony Orchestra of Panama. He teaches at Birmingham-Southern College, the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the Alabama School of Fine Arts. Hultgren also works in the behalf of arts as an organizer. He founded Birmingham Improv the annual festival of improvisatory arts.

Currently, Hultgren is Chair of the Board of Directors of the Metropolitan Youth Orchestras of Central Alabama. He is a founding member and former President of the Birmingham Art Music Alliance, a composer's organization. For ten years, he produced the Hultgren Solo Cello Works Biennial, a competition for living composers of solo cello works where he played the same program of finalists in Birmingham, Atlanta and Tuscaloosa. The audience votes to choose a winner in each venue.

I am a cellist who views contemporary composition, instrumental playing and free improvisation as very sympathetic, creative activities. I try to balance, inform and infuse all three of these sometimes diffuse endeavors. Improvisation is an artistic style that affords the opportunity for uniquely individual expression and is where I am most original. This is achieved through nontraditional or unusual ways of playing the instrument. Chaotic playing is another element of the style, yet somehow a pattern always emerges.