Mark O'Connor (born August 5, 1961) is an American fiddle player, composer, guitarist, and mandolinist whose music combines bluegrass, country, jazz and classical.

[8][9] In 1973, O'Connor's mother drove him and his little sister from Seattle to Nashville, Tennessee, where a local friend suggested that he might be allowed to play at the Picking Parlour.

[11][13] After graduating from the Mountlake Terrace High School in 1979, O'Connor joined the David Grisman Quintet as the replacement for guitar player, Tony Rice, and went out on tour with Stephane Grappelli with whom he performed at Carnegie Hall when he was only seventeen-years-old.

[15] Several of his teenage albums are noteworthy and inspired a generation of young acoustic musicians, such as "Pickin' In The Wind", "A Texas Jam Session", "Markology" and "False Dawn".

He released a series of instrumental albums such as "Elysian Forest" and "On The Mark" as well as teaming up with Bela Fleck, Sam Bush, Jerry Douglas and Edgar Meyer for "Strength In Numbers".

Between 1995 and 2000, O'Connor teamed up with Yo-Yo Ma and Edgar Meyer to release "Appalachia Waltz" and "Appalachian Journey" spending nearly 2 years at the top of the classical music Billboard charts.

[18] In 1997, O'Connor and others composed and performed music based on folk melodies as arrangements for the American Revolutionary War-era Public Broadcasting Service documentary miniseries, Liberty!

Over a period of five years, O'Connor teamed up with jazz musicians Frank Vignola and Jon Burr for a trilogy of "Hot Swing Trio" albums dedicated to his mentor Stephane Grappelli.

O'Connor recorded Thirty-Year Retrospective in 2003 with the mandolinist Chris Thile, guitarist Bryan Sutton, and bassist Byron House.

His composition Appalachia Waltz (appearing on the album of the same title) has been adopted by Yo-Yo Ma as part of his live performance repertoire.

On April 28, 2009, O'Connor teamed with chamber musicians Ida Kavafian, Paul Neubauer and Matt Haimovitz to present his second and third string quartets, amalgamating bluegrass with classical styles, at Merkin Concert Hall in New York.

[31] The method places an emphasis on music and playing techniques from North America, in addition to focusing on rhythmic development, ear training, and improvisation.

The method is published as a series of books that also contains short essays about famous Americans who played fiddle, such as Johnny Gimble, Ray Nance, Byron Berline, Pinchas Zukerman, Eddie South, Kenny Baker, Benny Thomasson, Scott Joplin, Thomas Jefferson and Davy Crockett, and the history of a wide variety of music including jazz, bluegrass, Romani, western swing, cajun, blues, African American Spirituals, ragtime and Mariachi.

[35] His collaborative single "Restless" (with Vince Gill, Ricky Skaggs and Steve Wariner) won the 1991 CMA Vocal Event of the Year award.