With a unique profile in education, performance, and entrepreneurship, Alissa Freeman is a passionate musician who is always working on a new project. Her accomplishments in performance, pedagogy, and research have been vast and varied as the recipient of dozens of awards and grants, numerous full-tuition academic and music scholarships, and performances and presentations nationally and internationally.

As a performer, Alissa invites audiences to have new experiences in classical music by incorporating and contextualizing diverse programming. For example, one recent program was a series entitled Passports: Piano Music from Across the Continents which incorporated music inspired and written on each of the seven continents. In addition to finding works outside of the canon, she also enjoys tackling complex standard repertoire. She recently recorded the entire set of Chopin’s Op. 25 etudes and was the soloist for performances of Rachmaninov’s 2nd and Prokofiev’s 2nd piano concertos.

Alissa is passionate about promoting women in music. As the creator of the ||:HerClassical:|| project, a new online resource, she has been a key leader in increasing the accessibility of works written by women from the classical era to pianists and pedagogues. Her most recent performance of Doreen Carwithen’s Piano Concerto with the Ann Arbor Symphony was driven by a desire to help find and promote great works by women, and it was the Michigan premiere of this piece. This performance was released on YouTube as the first audio/video recording of the work.

Alissa Freeman recently completed her MM and DMA in piano pedagogy and performance at the University of Michigan, during which time she received many prestigious awards including the Rackham Doctoral Fellowship and Presser Graduate Music Award. She has studied with some of the world’s top instructors, including Logan Skelton, John Ellis, Scott Holden, and Maria Prinz. During her undergraduate degree, Alissa became the first student to perform concerti with all three of the university orchestras after winning school concerto competitions.