Chelsea Randall is a New York-native pianist, curator and educator. She is a dedicated advocate of underrepresented composers and new music, and seeks to create fresh dialogues between the old, new and undiscovered as a performer and collaborator. Her eclectic programming has been featured at national and international venues including Weill Recital Hall, Alice Tully Hall, The Kaufman Center, Yamaha Piano Salon, Steinway Hall, The Princeton Club, Mannes School of Music, Manhattan School of Music, Old First Concerts in SF, St. Peter’s Church Hammersmith in London, Clare College at the University of Cambridge and Théâtre Adyar in Paris, and she has appeared as a soloist and chamber musician at the Pacific, Colby, Allegro and Orvieto festivals. She has also been broadcast on radio stations including NY’s WNYC and WWFM and SF’s KALW. She is the recipient of numerous accolades, including performance and research grants from New Music USA, Music Talks, Live From Our Living Rooms, McGill University and Conservatoire de Paris. In ‘22 Chelsea launched her American Mavericks Project (AMP) dedicated to piano music by Black American composers 1900-present with a US tour featuring overlooked masterpieces by George Walker and Dorothy Rudd Moore among others, and premieres by emerging composers. As part of AMP’s educational initiatives, she edited the first engraved edition of Dorothy Rudd Moore’s monumental “Dream and Variations” for solo piano (1974) for American Composers Alliance. In ‘23 with support from New Music USA’s Creator Fund, Chelsea presented the inaugural concert of her Crossings project exploring connections between African and Western music, with kora master Malang Jobarteh at Brooklyn Conservatory of Music. She is also the co-founder and artistic director of EXTENSITY Concert Series in NY, which aims to promote equity and diversity in classical music. EXT’s ‘22 season featured the month-long Women Now festival dedicated to living women composers.

Highlights of Chelsea’s ’24 season include an extended US tour of the American Mavericks Project, new commissions for AMP from Carolyn Yarnell, Adolphus Hailstork, Regina Harris Baiocchi and Joyce Solomon Moorman inspired by poets Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Naomi Long Madgett and Dudley Randall, AMP lecture/recitals in partnership with Brooklyn public schools and community music schools, and NYC presentations of Crossings, featuring new original kora and piano pieces.

As an educator, Chelsea runs Clinton Hill Piano Studio in Brooklyn, and regularly presents workshops, masterclasses and lectures at educational institutions across the US. She is an alum of New York University, The Royal College of Music in London and The Juilliard School. Her teachers and mentors included Herbert Stessin, Niel Immelman and Elena Leonova.

Chelsea is also an accomplished editor and writer, and considers her editorial and musical pursuits to be intertwined and mutually reinforcing. She has worked at presses and journals including Columbia University Press, Soft Skull Press and The New York Quarterly, and holds a degree in English from The Gallatin School of Individualized Study, NYU.