Born and raised in San Francisco, Holly Chung is a Bay Area-based writer, pianist, and educator. Currently, she works as a writer at USC Radio Group, the largest classical radio network in the country, and as an independent piano teacher. She is an affiliate faculty member of the Musicianship Department at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in the Pre-College and Continuing Education Division. Her academic research focuses on French music of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly Maurice Ravel. She is a previous recipient of a Mellon Foundation grant, a Beinecke Research Fellowship, and a Yale European Studies Council Fellowship. She holds a PhD in Music History from Yale and a BA magna cum laude from Columbia University, with a double major in Music and French.

Dr. Chung has accumulated nearly a decade of teaching experience as a university instructor and piano teacher, and has taught courses in music history, music appreciation, music theory, and keyboard skills at Yale and McGill. Previously, she served on the Piano Faculty at Little Mission Studio in San Francisco. She was a founding member of the New York Chapter of the Small Miracles Foundation, where she created an after-school music program at PS-145 (The Bloomingdale School) in New York. She has a passion for teaching students of all ages and helping them reach their full potential. Her teaching style focuses on creating a strong foundation in basic techniques that will allow the student to excel at any repertoire.

Dr. Chung’s training encompasses a wide variety of approaches, from classical to jazz and world music. She studied piano in the Pre-College Division of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music under Tomoko Hagiwara. She also studied jazz piano under Kevin Rayhill. As a junior in high school, she was selected as a California Arts Scholar, completing an intensive program at California Institute of the Arts where she studied both classical piano under Gaylord Mowrey and jazz piano under Kenn Cox, culminating in performances at CalArts and The Jazz Bakery in LA. She continued her classical studies at Columbia University under Michael Skelly and Emma Tahmizian, where she performed new works with Columbia New Music. While completing her graduate education at Yale, she studied under Erika Schroth and Euntaek Kim. Dr. Chung was also a member of Yale Gamelan Suprabanggo (Central Javanese Gamelan Ensemble) for over five years, and had the joy of performing widely in the Connecticut area with the ensemble and working with Dr. Sarah Weiss, Dr. Sumarsam, Darsono, and Dr. Maho Ishiguro.