Cynthia Marie Dillard is a pianist, songwriter, & teacher with a background in classical, jazz, blues, and folk music. She is a Honolulu Symphony Best and Brightest Concerto Competition winner, Berklee College of Music Summer Performance Program Songwriter Showcase winner, and a graduate of the University of Washington School of Music in Seattle, WA, with a Bachelor of Arts in Music. She studied classical piano with Bonnie Litten and Ann Tanabe, and more recently boogie-woogie piano with Caroline Dahl, and jazz piano with Debbie Poryes.
Cynthia is a recipient of the Maryland State Arts Council Independent Artist Award, Jackstraw Artist-in-Residency and Seattle Mayor’s Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs’ Smart Ventures grant. She has produced two full-length albums and one EP of original music, and was a commissioned composer for Gamelan Pacifica and Washington Women in Jazz Festival. Her music has been performed on a variety of radio programs including Voices from the DMV, Takoma WOWD-LP, and NPR’s WAMU Bandwidth. She is a regular performer at the Takoma Park Folk Festival’s Crossroads Stage, sponsored by Strathmore.
As a collaborator, she appears as pianist and/or vocalist, songwriter, or producer on a discography of over 18 recordings with artists from coast to coast such as Jason Masi, Elena & Los Fulanos, Jahnel Daliya, Summer Januaries, & Steve Olof Larson. As an arranger, she has published over 30 sheet music arrangements sold internationally on Sheet Music Plus, and is the author of new piano primer, Piano Studio with Cynthia Marie.
She has performed her songs in Boston, Seattle, DC, Maryland, Virginia, New York, Philadelphia, North Carolina, and Breschia, Italy. She resides in Maryland, where she enjoys teaching piano to her students at Mike’s Music in Ellicott City, MD, music and chorus at Holy Child, and students from coast to coast online at her Columbia Piano Studio.
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