Diego Carneiro was born in Belém, in the Amazon region of Brazil. He studied cello, piano, viola da gamba and conducting, in Brazil; at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri; at Trinity College of Music in London; and at the Haute Ecole de Musique, in Switzerland.

Diego has had broad and varied musical career, including cello performance, conducting and composition. In 2009, Diego established a foundation called AmazonArt, originally based in London and now based in Ecuador, with the mission of “changing lives through music.” Since 2016, this mission has been fulfilled largely through the Orquesta Joven del Ecuador (Youth Orchestra of Ecuador), of which Diego is the founder and music director. To learn more about AmazonArt and the Orquesta Joven del Ecuador, click here.

As a performer, Diego has participated as a soloist and teacher in many international festivals, including the London Promenade at the Royal Albert Hall. He has also produced three documentaries, “A Cello in Kenya”, “Amazon, the Resonant Jungle” and “Conference of the Birds”, which reflect his studies of musical composition related to birdsong. He has performed concerts and given classes in countries on five different continents.

In 2024, Diego spent three months as a Rotary Peace Fellow at the Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, where he launched a global initiative called Orchestrating Peace through Music. As part of that initiative, he is now at work on a new composition for solo cello entitled Paths to Peace, to be premiered at the annual Rotary International Convention in Calgary in June 2025.