Chelsea de Souza is a Steinway Young Artist from Mumbai, India. She has won four All-India piano competitions, the 2010 IIYM international piano competition, the 2013 Ohio Tuesday Musical Scholarship Organization competition, second prize at the 2019 Cranbrook Music Guild Emerging Artist Competition, and the Global Scholar-Education World Young Achievers Award in Music and Arts. Chelsea has been interviewed on NBC TV, performed live on public radio in Kansas and Florida, and appeared in concert across the US, Belgium, Germany, France and India.
A musician of varied interests, both solo and collaborative, Chelsea performed with the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble, and was part of Oberlin’s Performance and Improvisation Series for two years, including a Young Artist residency with the Detroit String and Wind Society in 2015. She was a regular pianist with Peabody’s contemporary ensembles ‘Now Hear This’ and the Peabody Modern Orchestra, and performed with the award-winning chamber ensemble “Alarm Will Sound” during their 2018 residency at the Peabody Institute. She is a committed performer of music by living composers, and has premiered numerous works for solo piano and small ensemble by composers at the Oberlin Conservatory and the Peabody Institute. As a singer, she was co-director of Oberlin’s longest-running all-female a cappella group ‘Nothing But Treble’.
Chelsea holds Bachelor’s degrees in Politics and in Piano Performance and Vocal Accompanying from Oberlin College and Conservatory, where she studied with Peter Takács. She was awarded a teaching assistantship in the Keyboard Studies department for her graduate studies at the Peabody Institute with Boris Slutsky. She graduated from Peabody with a Master’s degree and the Lynn Taylor Hebden Performance Prize in 2018, and was awarded a Performance Diploma and the Graduate Prize in Accompanying in 2019. She is now pursuing her doctorate at the Shepherd School of Rice University with Jon Kimura Parker.