Celeste Pepitone-Nahas grew up in Portland Oregon and began studying piano at age seven. She received awards from the OMTA Classical, Romantic, and Baroque festivals while studying with Denise VanLeuven. In 2013 she preformed the Shostakovich Piano Concerto No. 2 with the festival orchestra at the Young Musicians and Artists program in Salem, Oregon. She has attended the Brevard Music Festival and the Eastern Music Festival and studied with both Dr. Douglas Weeks and William Wolfram. This summer she is studying piano with Andre Laplante at the Orford Academy, and will also be attending the Atlantic Music Festival and the Summit Music Festival. Celeste’s dedication to piano has led her across the world. In 2015 she interned at the Tbilisi State Conservatory and for her Fall 2016 semester she lived and studied in Vienna, Austria. While in Vienna, Celeste worked with Professor Albert Sassmann and fell in love with the world of opera, Viennese pedagogy and German romanticism. Celeste will be majoring in English at Williams College and plans to go on to study piano performance and pedagogy at the graduate level. At Williams she studies with Doris Stevenson.