Charisse Baldoria

Charisse Baldoria is a pianist, composer, writer, and educator who draws upon her Southeast Asian and Hispanic heritage, her life in Pennsylvania, and various art forms in her work. An award winner in numerous piano competitions, including the San Antonio, Sydney, and Hilton Head Island international piano competitions, she has performed as soloist on five continents, collaborated with dancers, visual artists, performance artists, and Hindustani classical performers, and published her music and literary writing.

Her newest album Godowsky in Asia (Centaur) presents virtuoso pianist-composer Leopold Godowsky’s monumental Java Suite, twelve pieces inspired by his travels to the island of Java in 1923. Her album Gamelan on Piano features music inspired by Southeast Asia, including the world premiere recording of Philippine National Artist Ramon Pagayon Santos’s Gong-An suite and works by Lou Harrison, Colin McPhee, and Gareth Farr. Evocación (Blue Griffin) showcases flamenco and tango inspirations, with works by Albéniz, Falla, Piazzolla, Scarlatti, and Filipino composer Francisco Buencamino. Her forthcoming album Alchemy (Centaur) features her two song cycles and several original compositions for solo piano, drawing upon improvisation and blending elements of classical, jazz, Latin, Asian, and popular styles.

Born in the Philippines, she came to the United States as a Fulbright scholar for graduate school. She studied piano with Logan Skelton and composition with Erik Santos and Susan Botti at the University of Michigan where she received her master’s and doctoral degrees, and with pianist Nita Abrogar-Quinto at the University of the Philippines. She is Associate Professor of Music at Commonwealth University in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania where she teaches piano and composition, as well as Interdisciplinary Creation at the Honors College. Her piano students have won competition prizes and gone onto graduate programs.

She was a 2023 DISQUIET Literary Prize finalist in nonfiction, shortlisted for fiction in 2024, and semifinalist in the 2024 Story Foundation Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Chautauqua Journal, The Common online, Windmill: The Hofstra Journal of Art and Literature, Cutbank, Good Life Review, Passengers, and the anthology Rivers, Ridges, and Valleys: Essays on Rural Pennsylvania (Catamount Press). She has a literary nonfiction book under contract with Kent State University Press (2027).

She has enjoyed hang-gliding in Rio, skydiving in Pennsylvania, paragliding in the Swiss Alps, and scuba-diving in the Tubbataha reefs, and embarks on culinary explorations wherever she goes. cbaldoria.com