Pianist Elizabeth Schumann has a diverse career portfolio of projects, recordings, and performances which have brought her all over the world as recitalist, chamber musician, and concerto soloist. The Washington Post noted her playing as “deft, relentless, and devastatingly good—the sort of performance you experience not so much with your ears as your solar plexus.”

The first place winner of both the Bösendorfer International Piano Competition and the Pacific International Piano Competition, Dr. Schumann has won over 25 prizes and awards in other major national and international competitions, including the Cleveland International Piano Competition and the Hilton Head International Piano Competition. She was honored with the prestigious Gilmore Young Artists Award, and was highlighted in a PBS Television documentary on the Gilmore Festival.

Dr. Schumann has performed solo recitals and chamber music concerts worldwide, in such venues as the Kennedy Center, Vienna’s Bösendorfer Saal, Toronto’s Koerner Hall, and Montreal’s Place des Arts. Her recitals have been broadcast live on public radio and television in cities around the world, including Washington D.C., New York, Sydney, Cleveland, Montréal, Dallas, and Chicago, and were featured at the International UNICEF benefit concert for Hurricane Katrina Victims, the Cannes Film Festival, the Gilmore Festival, Australia’s Huntington Festival, the Musica Viva chamber music series, the Ravinia “Rising Stars” Series, and National Public Radio’s “Performance Today.” Dr. Schumann gave the world premiere performance of Carl Vine’s Sonata No. 3, which the composer dedicated to her.

Passionate about creating public access to the arts, Dr. Schumann founded Piano Theatre, an artist group formed to engage audiences with innovative combinations of classical music, theatre, literature, art, and technology. Piano Theatre’s recent tours of the US, Canada and Australia were acclaimed by critics and audiences alike. Dr. Schumann founded and is president of Project Classical, Inc.¸ a 501(c)(3) organization whose mission is to support artist-led initiatives that encourage public education and appreciation of classical music. Concerned with the declining funding for arts education in the United States, Dr. Schumann devised and directed Piano Carnival, a project to introduce free, high quality classical concert music to children in areas without arts education.

Carrying on the pedagogical tradition of her teacher, Sergei Babayan, Dr. Schumann is a member of the piano faculty at Stanford University, and has been on faculty at Itzhak Perlman’s Perlman Music Program and the Crowden Chamber Workshop. She is the director of the Schumann Studio, a classical recording space in San Francisco.