Nina Drath, Poland/USA

Nina Drath began her piano studies at the age of four in Katowice, Poland at the age of four with Wanda Chmielowska. She started to concertize abroad at the age of eleven in Czechoslovakia, where she made her first recording for radio broadcasting. She continued her piano studies with Regina Smendzianka at the Academy of Music in Warsaw, where she received her master's degree in Piano Performance. Then she entered the Virtuoso Study Program, which she completed in 1980. Between 1975 and 1980 she performed with the symphony orchestras in Frankfurt and Leipzig and competed in several international piano competitions. She was a prize winner in both the Paloma O'Shea International Piano

Competition in Spain in 1976 and the International Piano Competitionin Senigallia, Italy in 1979, and won a Polish piano competition in Slupsk in 1979.

Nina Drath has recorded several compositions by Fryderyk Chopin, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Peter Petroff, an American composer from San Antonio.

In 1994-1996, she performed and gave master classes at Venice Piano Festival and Academia Ducale in Genova, Italy, in Poland, in Leiden, Holland and in the U.S.A.

During the summers of 1996 and 1997, she gave master classes and recitals in Paris, France. She served as a jury member in the Ricardo Vinesz Piano Competition in Lerida, Spain and performed in Liege, Belgium. Also during the 1990s, she was appointed to the Order of International Ambassadors. In June 2006, Nina Drath traveled as a Cultural Envoy to Beruit, Lebanon and performed Bernstein's "Age of Anxiety" with the National Lebanese Symphony Orchestra. In November 2007, she performed for the Barletta Music Association in Italy and the Music Conservatory in Vise, Belgium.

Nina Drath is the Founder and President of the Frederyk Chopin Society of Texas, Inc.

Paderewski International Piano Competition

Farmington, Connecticut

presented by Connecticut Chopin Foundation, Inc.