Chelsea Randall is a New York-native pianist, curator and educator. She is a dedicated advocate of underrepresented and new music, and seeks to create fresh dialogues between the old, new and undiscovered. She has performed at national and international venues including Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully Hall, Yamaha Piano Salon, Steinway Hall, Manhattan School of Music, NJ Performing Arts Center, Old First Concerts in SF, St. Peter’s Church Hammersmith in London, University of Cambridge, UK and Théâtre Adyar in Paris, and has appeared as a guest soloist and chamber musician at the Pacific, Colby, Allegro and Orvieto festivals. Her playing has also been broadcast on radio stations including NY’s NPR and WWFM and SF’s KALW. She has received grants and awards from New Music USA, Music Talks, Live From Our Living Rooms, McGill University and Conservatoire de Paris, among others. In ‘22 Chelsea launched the American Mavericks Project (AMP), celebrating piano music by Black American composers 1900-present through performances and commissions, with a US tour featuring overlooked masterpieces by Black 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, she debuted the Crossings Project exploring connections between African and Western music, with kora master Malang Jobarteh at the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music. She is also the co-founder and director of EXTENSITY Concert Series in NY, which aims to promote diversity in classical music. EXT’s ‘22 season featured the Women Now Festival, dedicated to living women composers.

Highlights of Chelsea’s ’24-’25 season include an extended US tour of the American Mavericks Project, new commissions for AMP by Carolyn Yarnell, Adolphus Hailstork, Regina Harris Baiocchi and Joyce Solomon Moorman inspired by poets Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Naomi Long Madgett and Dudley Randall, lecture/recitals in partnership with NYC public schools and community music schools, a guest performance at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine’s inaugural Juneteenth celebration, and presentations of the Crossings Project at venues including St. Mark’s Church-in-the Bowery, NY.

As an educator, Chelsea 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 Elena Leonova, Niel Immelman and Herbert Stessin.

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.