The Swiss-Japanese-American violinist Valentina Paetsch, born in Lugano in 1998, grew up in a family of musicians and received her first violin lessons at the age of four from her mother. She began her musical training at the Conservatorio della Svizzera Italiana in Lugano. In 2014, she started her pre-college studies at the Zurich Conservatory with Philip Draganov. From 2017 onward, she studied at the Berlin University of the Arts with Nora Chastain and her assistant Marlene Ito.

Valentina Paetsch has received numerous awards, including the Förderpreis of the Mozart Society Zurich (2016), third prize at the Ibolyka Gyarfas Violin Competition in Berlin (2019), and a special prize from the Ottilie Selbach-Redslob Foundation (2020). In November 2021, as a member of Trio Vanitas, she was awarded a prize at the ORPHEUS Suisse Chamber Music Competition.

From 2017 to 2021, she was a member of Ensemble Esperanza, which received the OPUS KLASSIK award in 2018. Between 2022 and 2023, she was an academy member of the Staatskapelle Berlin, where she was mentored by Lifan Zhu, and she was also a scholarship holder of Villa Musica Rheinland-Pfalz. Since January 2024, Valentina Paetsch has been a permanent member of the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin. She plays a violin by Carlo Bergonzi from the year 1715.