Brinton Averil Smith, born in 1969 in Royal Oak, Michigan, is an American cellist. He began studying cello at eight and later enrolled full-time at Arizona State University at fourteen, earning a BA in Mathematics at seventeen. Smith pursued graduate studies at the University of Southern California before enrolling at Juilliard School, where he received MM and DMA degrees. He was appointed principal cellist of the San Diego Symphony in 1994, and later served as principal cellist for the Fort Worth Symphony (1996-2002) and a section cellist with the New York Philharmonic (2002-2005). Since 2005, he has been the principal cellist of the Houston Symphony. Smith's notable performances include the first professional rendition of "Castelnuovo-Tedesco's Cello Concerto" in over eighty years, released on Naxos in 2018.
