Classically trained. Professionally active. Deeply committed.

Bachelor of Music and Master of Music in Piano Performance from The Juilliard School.
Collaborative artist and educator
Serving students in New Jersey and the greater metropolitan area

the beginnings. . .

There was always music in our house when I was growing up. My father constantly had a record playing, and I still remember one of those Japanese songs from his childhood. My mother was always singing, whether she was cooking, knitting, or busy somewhere around the house.

The moment my mother was told she had given birth to a girl—they had three boys before me—she decided that I would learn to play the piano. She was a self-taught musician who played many different instruments. As the eldest of eight children in a poor pastor's family, she never had the opportunity for formal lessons. Yet she taught herself to play the piano, organ, flute, drums, and several other instruments. My father once told her she had been born in the wrong era, or at the very least, should have been born a man. It was her dream that one of her children would have the musical education she never had.

One of my earliest musical study memories isn't of a piano, but of a notation chart my mother had brought home one day. It showed the entire keyboard under the matching notes on the grand staff. We played matching games on it over and over again. I might’ve had a knack for visual learning, but I like to think those early lessons contributed to my sight-reading ability. Either way, I still remember that chart and how it taught me to recognize notes before we even had a piano in the house.