Faculty Profiles

Kayo Iwama

Associate Director Graduate Vocal Arts Program / Piano

Kayo Iwama, Head of Program for the Graduate Vocal Arts Program at the Bard Conservatory, has performed extensively with singers such as Christópheren Nomura, Lucy Shelton and Dawn Upshaw throughout North America, Europe, and Japan, in venues such as the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center, Weill Recital Hall, Boston’s Jordan Hall, the Gardner Museum, Seiji Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood, the Kennedy Center, Tokyo’s Yamaha Hall, and the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. In addition to her work at Bard, she is on the faculty and serves as coordinator of the vocal studies program at the Tanglewood Music Center. She was previously on the music staffs of the Steans Institute at the Ravinia Festival and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and has held teaching positions at the Hartt School of Music, the Boston Conservatory and the New England Conservatory of Music. She earned a Bachelors of Music degree at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music and a Masters of Music at SUNY Stony Brook, where she studied with Gilbert Kalish as a Graduate Council Fellow. She also attended the Salzburg Music Festival, the Banff Music Center, the Music Academy of the West, and the Tanglewood Music Center, where she worked with such artists as Margo Garrett, Martin Isepp, Graham Johnson, Martin Katz, and Erik Werba. Formerly a resident of Boston for many years, she was featured numerous times on WGBH radio and was pianist and music director of the critically acclaimed Cantata Singers Chamber Series, programs devoted to rarely heard works of art song and vocal chamber music. Iwama can be heard on CD on the Well-Tempered label, with baritone Christópheren Nomura in Schubert’s Die Schöne Müllerin, and on two ISMM discs devoted to French mélodies and the songs of Schumann with tenor Ingul Ivan Oak.
Phone: 845-752-2306
E-mail: iwama@bard.edu
Website: http://www.bard.edu/vap