Pianist Anna-Sofia Botti is pursuing a DMA at the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University with Brian Connelly, where she also earned her MM.  She holds bachelor’s degrees in Piano and Historical Studies from Bard College & Conservatory of Music studying with Benjamin Hochman.

Anna-Sofia has earned reviews that she “mines [the music’s] less obvious poetry” and “plays with a beautiful classical yet passionate elegance” (Jim Lowe, Times Argus), and she previously won first prizes in the Vermont Philharmonic Concerto Competition and the Vermont All-State Piano Scholarship.  She also won the Bard College Concerto Competition as a mezzo-soprano and has sung partial roles as Rosenkavelier’s Octavian and Werther’s Charlotte, among others.  An avid performer of contemporary music, she has premiered works by composers Pierre Jalbert, Oliver Dubon, Ethan Soledad, and Tian Qin.  She has performed on series such as Music in Context (Houston), SPECTRA Music (Los Angeles), and the American Viola Society Festival.

A passionate teacher, Anna-Sofia earned her certification as a Suzuki instructor before returning to graduate school and holds a faculty position at Berkshire Summer Music in Sheffield, MA, where she has taught for twelve years.  She worked for the Bard Prison Initiative to teach piano at a prison in upstate NY and recently began a research project on music education in prisons.  As Instructor of Record at the Shepherd School of Music, she has taught private lessons and class piano, and in fall of 2026 teaches an original course on music and resistance in the twentieth century.

Anna-Sofia’s passion for history shapes her academic pursuits.  Her undergraduate thesis examined newspapers and dissent in WWII Japanese American concentration camps, and current research interests include twentieth-century American music and its relationship with Black American culture.  She loves to perform historically underrepresented and forgotten repertoire.