I’ve been surrounded by all kinds of music as long as I can remember.  One grandma sang church and children’s music, and I took to heart their messages of love, kindness, and sharing good things.  My other grandmother loved the opera and I still sit in the seats at the Capitol Theatre where we cried over the fates of Verdi’s and Puccini’s heroines.  My dad listened to the country radio station where all you needed was “three chords and the truth”.  My mother—a fine pianist, herself—practiced Chopin, Mozart, and Debussy.  She was my first teacher, starting my music lessons when I was five years old.

A few years later, she enrolled me in the Youth Conservatory at Utah State University, where I studied with Charlene Shelzi Jarvis and Annette Colledge. I was a student at Weber State University where I studied Piano Performance and Pedagogy with Drs. Ralph van der Beek and Yu-Jane Yang.  I fell in love with collaborative music while at Weber State, where I was employed as an accompanist for the Ballet Department (Joanne Lawrence, Amanda Sowerby), the Voice Department (Karen Brookens Bruestle), the String Department (Viktor Uzur), and the Musical Theatre Department (Jim Christian, Bradley Vieth).  I was a founding member of the piano trio, Tria Fata.  We performed around the country at festivals including the Green Lake Chamber Music Festival (Vermeer String Quartet, Amelia Piano Trio), the Northern Lights Music Festival (Veda Zuponic, Marina Horak, Thom Rosenburg), and the MTNA Chamber Music Competitions (National Finalists, 2010).

I've just started work as the Company Pianist at Ballet West, which has been a phenomenal experience! More recently, I have been employed as a Collaborative Pianist by the Sid and Mary Foulger Chamber Music Festival (Dr. Jean Barr, Lydia Artymiw, Shi-Hwa Wang), SummerSong (Kimi Kawashima), the Department of Musical Theatre Voice Studios (University of Utah), Imagine Ballet Theatre (Raymond van Mason), and a number of theater companies across the USA.  Currently, I’m the Acting Artistic Director for NEXT Ensemble, a chamber music collective in Ogden, UT, where we hope to transform the concert experience by creating engaging musical programs in spaces where you wouldn’t expect to hear formal art music (read: chamber music in a bar!!!).