Who am I?

I’m Leah. A mom and a wife, a Christian and a musician, a current New Yorker and a Texan at heart. I struggle with depression and my faith, with disciplining our son and keeping our apartment clean(ish). I’m a runner (well, I was before my children were born) and I love yoga. I’m a voracious apple-eater and a dog-lover and I have a slight obsession with the number seven and paisley designs.

I’ve been blessed with amazing opportunities and supportive parents and a fantastic education, and have pursued most of my serious interests at one time or another – I’ve worked in a neurobio lab and followed monkeys around forests in Bali; I have performed in Carnegie Hall and organized concerts in NYC hospitals; I’ve taken amazing journalism classes at Yale and write for magazines I once dreamed I might be a part of.

My life these days is a hodge-podge of freelance performing, writing, arts consulting, and mom-ing (you didn’t know that MOM is a verb?), and in any given month I’m probably doing too much of something and too little of something else. I have degrees in English from Yale University and viola performance from SUNY-Purchase and the New England Conservatory and was a Fellow of the prestigious Ensemble ACJW – a Program of Carnegie Hall, the Juilliard School, and the Weill Music Institute when I first moved to New York.

After an amazing two years in that program (and nearly a dozen concerts in Carnegie), I began working full-time at the Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall, and my experiences and colleagues there remain close to my heart. Read more about Musical Connections, the program I worked the most with. You can learn more about my writing career HERE and watch a video of me as a tightrope dog-walker here (just kidding. I’m borderline afraid of heights. I would never do that).

And really, that’s all you need to know about me. I listen to lyrics. I like to count things. I crave being near the ocean. Sometimes I write in haiku and I love to pose abstract questions. If you were a piece of furniture, what would you be?