Chara Steliou
Adjunct Instructor of Music Performance (Piano)
Affiliation: NYU Abu Dhabi
Education: BMus University of Sheffield; MMus Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama; PhD candidate Durham University
Research Areas: Music memory, music psychology, piano pedagogy, piano memorisation techniques
Chara Steliou is a Cypriot pianist with several years of experience across the UK, Cyprus, and the UAE. She is currently the Head of Piano at Nord Anglia International School, Dubai. She holds a Bachelor of Music from the University of Sheffield (UK), where she studied piano under the tutelage of Benjamin Frith, and a Master of Music from the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama (UK), where she studied with Richard McMahon and Graham Fitch. Over the years, she took part in numerous piano masterclasses by world-renowned pianists, such as Alfred Brendel, Polina Leschenko, James Kirby, Martin Jones, Elena Kuschnerova, and others.
Currently, she is a PhD candidate at Durham University (UK), with research interests in music memory, piano pedagogy, and piano memorization techniques. Her interests derive from her daily interaction with piano students and the need to develop a practically and empirically informed memorization system in order to assist piano students in memorizing and improving their performance experience.
Her latest achievements include presenting the results of her current research project, The Mneme Project — an intervention study aimed at helping students memorise music effectively — at three international music and science conferences held in Manchester, São Paulo, and Shanghai.