Dr. Rachel Iwaasa

IN-PERSON LESSONS

“Keyboard virtuoso and avant-garde muse” (Georgia Straight), Dr. RACHEL KIYO IWAASA is among Canada’s foremost contemporary music pianists. Rachel’s reputation for fearless performative risk has inspired many of Canada’s most notable composers to write for her, including Hildegard Westerkamp, Rodney Sharman, Jocelyn Morlock, Cris Derksen, Nicole Lizée, Farshid Samandari, Emily Doolittle, Jeffrey Ryan, Leslie Uyeda, and Jordan Nobles. Rachel’s album Known & Unknown was praised as “exceptional, gripping and timeless.” (Tom Haugen, Take Effect), and listed in the Top 10 Modern Composition Albums of 2024 by The Wire Magazine (UK). Rachel’s work as a recording artist is available from Redshift Records and earsay music. With SD Holman, Rachel co-founded the Queer Arts Festival in Vancouver, acknowledged as one the top three festivals of its kind in the world.

While grounded in the European classical tradition, Rachel’s art practice explodes expectations of what is possible at the piano, flowering most powerfully in liminal collisions between artistic genres. Her interdisciplinary adventures include work with artist SD Holman, film director Nettie Wild, playwright David Bloom, choreographers Jennifer Mascall, Idan Cohen and Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg, and multi-media provocateur Paul Wong.

Rachel’s musical pedigree traces back to Beethoven via three separate lineages, through Jane Coop, Menahem Pressler, and Robin Wood. She holds a Doctor of Musical Arts from the University of British Columbia, a Master of Music from Indiana University Bloomington, and a Bachelor of Music from the University of Victoria, where she earned the Victoria Medal as the top graduating student in Fine Arts. She was also a two-time recipient of the prestigious Annual Grant from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) for graduate studies at the Hochschule für Musik “Hanns Eisler” Berlin.