musician, teacher, workshop facilitator
Cindy was featured in the 2015 Nov/Dec Gainesville issue of "Our Town" magazine. Click below to see the article and photos.
She has been Musical Director/Pianist throughout the east coast in regional theatre, dinner theatre, resorts and with the USO in Germany and Italy. Locally, Cindy has been Musical Director/Pianist for many Gainesville Community Players productions. She performs with her improvisational piano duo “Without a Net”, with several jazz groups, and sometimes as a soloist, employing a blend of familiar and unfamiliar melodies, instruments and technologies.
Though trained classically, Cindy also plays by ear, and enjoys playing and teaching Blues, Jazz and Pop styles. She arranges and composes, and is a music technology “geek”, incorporating Garage Band, popular sequencing and notation software, and a host of musical apps in her personal music creativity and in her teaching. Cindy has studied free improvisation with Grammy award winning artists Bobby McFerrin and David Darling, and with Music for People, a national training organization for improvizational music. She is a member of the National Association of Music Teachers, Florida State Music Teachers Association, and the Gainesville Music Teacher's Association.
In private lessons, group lessons and in her unique workshops, Cindy uses innovative methods to release each person’s musical creativity, connecting them to the center of their musical self. She truly loves teaching music as much as playing it, and uses a combination of teaching methods uniquely suited to whatever styles are of interest to her students. She customizes lesson plans and accommodates for learning styles and special needs in order to find a pace that is comfortable for each student. Most importantly, Cindy strives to teach in a way that provides a joyful, imaginative musical journey uniquely suited to each student, inspiring a life long love of, and involvement in music, allowing musical knowledge, technical proficiency and musical expression and creativity to develop and flourish.
Cindy loves to share music with people of all ages through teaching it! She began piano study at the age of 5, continued through high school and college, and graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelor’s Degree in Music Education, with concentration in piano, voice and choral music, from James Madison University. As well as teaching piano and voice to all ages, Cindy’s life as a pianist, singer, conductor, and performer has allowed her to wear many musical hats for over 20 years. She taught K -12 public and private school music and drama for ten years in Naples, FL, and at the American School in Asuncion, Paraguay - teaching elementary music, conducting choirs and bands, and directing musicals.