OPHELIA SHAN

Ophelia Shan (单良) has made music with others since childhood. Growing up in China, she entered the affiliated high school of the Tianjin Conservatory of Music (天津音乐学院附中) as a piano performance major at age eleven, playing chamber music with professional musicians in her family and fellow conservatory students — an experience that shaped her understanding of collaborative playing as not merely accompaniment, but listening, responding, and building a musical interpretation together. She earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in piano performance from Xinghai Conservatory and Oklahoma City University, then devoted herself to collaborative piano, receiving her Professional Studies Diploma from the Cleveland Institute of Music under Anita Pontremoli, with further training from distinguished artists including Helen Sim, Mark Kosower, Peter Salaff, David Updegraff, and Franklin Cohen.

For the past ten years, Ophelia has been a collaborative pianist at the Baldwin Wallace University Conservatory of Music, where each semester she works with some 40 students and 15 faculty members across instrumental and vocal areas — performing in more than 20 recitals a year and supporting over 40 juries a semester, alongside masterclasses, auditions, competitions, and off-campus performances. Faculty regularly entrust her to coach students independently on ensemble, stylistic, rhythmic, and interpretive matters. Her work spans a broad range of contemporary music, including works by women, composers of color, and living composers; strong sight-reading and quick study let her prepare a large volume of repertoire under short deadlines.

As a performer, Ophelia has appeared with Great Lakes Light Opera, Cleveland Ballet, Red River Lyric Opera, Interlochen Center for the Arts, Opera Breve Vocal Intensive, BW Singers, and Cuyahoga Falls Community Chorus, and has played in master classes for Nelita True, Lynn Harrell, Frederick von Stade, Jennifer Koh, Matti Hirvonen, Joshua Roman, Eric Larson, and Melody Moore, among others. She previously served as collaborative pianist at Ashland University, Oklahoma City University, and Southern Nazarene University. Ophelia is the founder of the Ophelia Shan Piano Studio and Vice President of the Northeast Ohio Music Teachers Association, where she works with the board and Piano Cleveland on joint events serving the Northeast Ohio piano community.