Beth Nam
A native of Korea, Dr. Nam started taking piano lessons at the age of nine. Her major teachers include Ms. Sook-Ja Chae, Chet and Hak Soon Swiatkowski at Mount St. Mary’s College, Lois Roberts at El Camino College, and Martin Canin and Robert McDonald at Juilliard. She was associated with the South Bay Children’s Choir as soloist, accompanist, and assistant conductor under the artistic direction of Dr. Jane Hardester and Diane Simons. In 2007, she was invited by the choir as an assistant conductor to their England Tour, where they performed her motet, a composition that had on a competition sponsored by Juilliard’s Literature and Materials department.
Dr. Nam received the Bachelor of Music, Master of Music, and Doctorate of Musical Arts degrees as a scholarship student at The Juilliard School. She was awarded the Morse Fellowship, which allowed her to teach in two New York City Public School classrooms weekly, and the Teaching Fellowship in Secondary Piano, one of only 8 students in the school to be so awarded. She was also a piano faculty member of the MAP program (Music Advancement Program) at Juilliard from 2007 to 2012. Ms. Nam participated in the Bowdoin Festival in Maine as a teaching assistant and in the Leipzig International Festival in Germany. She has taught at the Geneva Conservatory of Music in New York City, where she was a piano faculty member from 2005 to 2014. She was also appointed as an adjunct faculty member at Concordia College in Bronxville, New York.
As an avid chamber musician, Dr. Nam had performed as the pianist of the highly acclaimed Allant Trio. Their first album, titled ‘Ignition’, was released under Sony Classical and they were also broadcasted on ABC Classic FM in Australia and WFMT radio station in Chicago. They have performed the Beethoven’s Triple Concerto with the Bergen Symphony Orchestra and the Greater Newburgh Symphony Orchestra. In 2014, they were invited by the Korea International Music Festival to perform Beethoven’s Triple Concerto at the Seoul Arts Center with the Seongnam Philharmonic Orchestra which was broadcasted by Korea’s MBC network. In February 2014, the trio gave a highly acclaimed debut recital at Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall in New York City. The trio was also awarded the Jonathan Madrigano Entrepreneurship Grant from the Juilliard School in 2013 for developing their educational project in promoting chamber music to beginning students. They have been guest teaching artists at various schools and have taught engaging music classes and master classes in schools such as the LBC Middle School and the Victorian College of the Arts Secondary School in Melbourne, Australia.
Dr. Nam had been an interim piano faculty at Occidental College in Glendale (2017-2018), a music director of choir and orchestra at the California Academy of Mathematics and Science in Carson (2017-2021) and an associate director at the South Bay Children’s Choir (2016-2018). She is currently teaching as an adjunct piano professor at the Biola University in La Mirada and a faculty at the Chamber Music | OC’s nationally recognized Pre-College Program.