Carla Schmakel

Carla holds a Bachelor of Music in performance from the American Conservatory of Music, with chamber music master studies at Northwestern University, and academic credits from the University of Illinois-Chicago, where she held an Illinois State Teacher Education Scholarship.

Advanced studies in performance and pedagogy (in Chicago) with Philip Cohen,Founder and Artistic Director of the Leonardo Project: an interdisciplinary performance arts program at Concordia University in Montreal.

She has been on the faculty at DAMAC since 2000 and previously on the faculties at the American Conservatory and the Jack Benny Center for the Arts, teaching a wide
variety of students. Carla also has many years of experience performing the solo, chamber, and orchestral piano repertoire.

She was a program organizer, researcher, and pianist for American Women Composers-Midwest, a composer-performer non-profit association advancing the long tradition of women composers. Her compact disc includes live performances made at Preston Bradley Hall of the Chicago Cultural Center and other venues during the AWC concert series.

She acted as third party adjudicator for the annual LaRock Composition Prize for Chicago College of Performing Arts-Roosevelt University students for its six year duration.

In 2008 she presented a piano recital of music by American composers featuring notated birdsong and other nature-inspired music in the historic Adler Center ballroom and at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York for the Guild of Natural Science Illustrator.