Gracie Terzian (born Grace Benedict Paine Terzian, in Providence, Rhode Island, and raised in Oakton, Virginia) is a singer-songwriter, ukulelist, and actor now based in New York City. She began performing early — dancing from age four and working professionally as a child actor in the Washington, D.C. theatre scene by twelve — and grew up listening to her father's jazz records. At the University of Virginia, where she earned a B.A. in Drama and played the title role in a campus production of Evita, she also sang with UVA's jazz combo and studied vocalese, at one point writing original lyrics to Miles Davis's trumpet solo on Wayne Shorter's "Iris" — a piece that later became a track on her debut EP. She is a member of Actors' Equity Association, with stage and screen credits at the Kennedy Center, Ford's Theatre, the Shakespeare Theatre Company, and the Folger Theatre.

Her most direct route into jazz came through Wells Hanley, her piano teacher at UVA, who continued co-writing with her by mail after she moved to New York. The two songs became the backbone of Saints and Poets, Terzian's debut EP, recorded acoustically at Spacebomb Studios in Richmond, Virginia, with Hanley on piano, Trey Pollard on guitar (and engineering), Randall Pharr on bass, and Brian Caputo on drums, produced by Mike Tynan. Released independently on May 5, 2015 — with no label, radio push, manager, or publicist behind it — the six-song EP debuted at No. 23 on the Billboard jazz albums chart and reached No. 3 on the iTunes jazz albums chart. Jazz critic Ted Gioia called her "a genuine talent," and Terry Teachout, the Wall Street Journal critic and Duke Ellington biographer, wrote that she "tells her tales of modern love with quiet delicacy and an inborn musicality that's impossible to overlook."

What set the record apart instrumentally was Terzian's lead instrument: the harp ukulele, an aNueNue tenor model with an extra arm of unfretted bass strings, which she discovered on YouTube and taught herself by ear, mapping its chord voicings against piano harmony. She later devised her own jazz-friendly retuning of the standard ukulele (dropping the G string to G-flat and the E string to E-flat) to make extended jazz chords easier to voice on the instrument — a detail that has made her something of a specialist reference point in ukulele-instruction circles as much as in jazz ones.

Terzian has stayed active well beyond that one EP without straying far from the same small, acoustic, largely self-produced world that built it. A holiday EP, Bells & White Branches — six Christmas standards rearranged for voice and harp ukulele — began circulating in late 2019 (Bandcamp's own listing now shows a 2020 date, likely a later repost; contemporary press coverage from December 2019 confirms the earlier release window). She has also turned up as a featured vocalist on other artists' records: guitarist Rotem Sivan's Antidote (recorded 2016, released 2017) and My Favorite Monster (2018), and songwriter Mathew Mozzoni's Hot Light (2023), plus a duet single, "Greensleeves," with singer Audrey Hayes (2020). Two new solo singles, "Heron" and "Brothers," appeared in May and July 2026, suggesting continued, if quiet, output. Locally, she has performed with the New Dominion Trio — guitarist Brett Jones, bassist Charlie Himel, and drummer Graham Doby, all fellow Virginia transplants — during a rooftop residency at Bar Hugo in Manhattan.

The other half of Terzian's public profile is educational rather than performing: she teaches ukulele and music theory (notation, chord and scale theory, intervals, songwriting, the circle of fifths) on her YouTube channel and via Patreon, and leads workshops internationally, including sessions specifically on her jazz retuning. Reported subscriber counts for the channel vary by source and by date — a Kala Brand Music artist page cites "over 130,000," while a Midwest Uke Camp instructor bio gives "over 60,000" — and neither is independently reconcilable here, but by any account it's a substantial teaching audience built almost entirely outside the conventional jazz-club circuit.

It's worth stating plainly what this profile is and isn't: Terzian is not a jazz-scene fixture in the way most artists in this catalog are. Her connection to jazz runs through one Billboard-charting EP, a handful of guest vocal credits on other people's jazz-adjacent records, and an unusual, genuinely jazz-informed approach to a folk instrument — not a sustained career of jazz recordings, sideman work, or festival dates. That is a real, verifiable credential, and it's the reason she has a place here; it is not the same thing as a deep jazz discography, and this profile doesn't pretend otherwise.

Terzian's musical identity is defined less by a jazz lineage of influences than by an unusual instrumental choice pushed toward jazz ends: the harp ukulele, retuned by her own hand to accommodate extended jazz harmony, played as a lead voice rather than a rhythm instrument. Her training runs through musical theatre and vocalese as much as through a conventional jazz apprenticeship — she wrote original lyrics to a transcribed Miles Davis solo before she ever wrote a jazz-charting song of her own, and her chief musical collaborator, pianist Wells Hanley, came into her life as a college piano teacher rather than a bandstand mentor. The result, on Saints and Poets, is a fully acoustic, intimate sound: original songwriting delivered with what critics have called "quiet delicacy," closer to a singer-songwriter record with a jazz rhythm section than to a straight-ahead vocal jazz date, and distinctive enough in instrumentation that it's the sound, more than any stylistic school, that defines her.