A musician with widely ranging interests, Grace Burns enjoys an active and varied career split between collaborative work, solo engagements, and teaching.

As an active chamber musician, Ms. Burns has performed in countless recitals over the years throughout the Pittsburgh area. Her specializations are in repertoire for violin, flute, and saxophone, and she has played for these studios at Duquesne University's Mary Pappert School of Music since 2017. Other recent collaborations include concerts with students and faculty at the Carnegie Mellon School of Music, Pittsburgh Festival Opera, Pittsburgh Concert Society, Westmoreland Symphony, and Pittsburgh Opera’s new opera development (Co-Opera) project.

As a soloist, Ms. Burns has performed in a wide variety of concerts and venues, ranging everywhere from informal house concerts to New York’s Carnegie Hall. Her solo engagements often lean heavily into new music, including past premiers of new works on the Pendulum New Music concert series, the rock-inspired “Deep Unto Deep” by Jim Simmons, and performing and music directing Boulder Local Theater’s premier of Jason Grote’s “Shostakovich or Silence”. She has also performed as part of the Meraki Trio, an ensemble devoted to commissioning and performing new works for the piano-flute-viola ensemble.

As a teacher, Ms. Burns has a thriving piano studio (see more about the lessons here), and is a frequent competition and festival adjudicator across the northeast.

Ms. Burns started studying piano at age 7 with Charles DeHeart. She went on to study with Jeanne Kierman Fischer at Rice University, where she graduated with honors and “Distinction in Research and Creative Work”. Her Master’s Degree in Piano Performance was at the University of Colorado - Boulder, where she studied with Dr. David Korevaar and had a graduate fellowship with the collaborative piano department. She has performed for a wide variety of master clinicians in both solo and chamber music including Richard Goode, John Perry, Paul Kantor, and Howard Karp, among others.