By Meryl Mantione

Dr. Angelin Chang was recently honored by the School of Music with the Outstanding Alumni Award for 2007, the highest alumni award given by the School.  The 2007 Grammy Award Winner for Best Instrumental Soloist with Orchestra, pianist Chang is recognized for her sense of poetry and technical brilliance.  She has concertized in Europe, Asia, Africa, South America and throughout the U.S. and North America. 

Dr. Chang's concert tours have led her to such venues as the Kennedy Center (Washington, D.C.), Kimmel Center (Philadelphia), Lincoln Center (New York), Severance Hall (Cleveland), St. Martin-in-the-Fields (London), Zelazowa Wola (Warsaw), Beijing Concert Hall (China), Sala Luis Ángel Arango (Bogotá), Schnittke Philharmonic Hall (Russia) and the South African Broadcasting Corporation.  She has performed at the U.S Department of State, for the United Nations Women's Organization and before the Royal Family of Nepal.

Recent releases of her CDs include Soaring Spirit (Albany Records) with Angelin Chang, piano and Joseph de Pasquale, viola; and Cleveland Chamber Symphony (TNC) with Angelin Chang as piano soloist in Olivier Messiaen's Oiseaux Exotiques and Dmitri Shostakovich's Piano Concerto No. 1. 

Chang holds the B.M. in Piano Performance and the B.A. in French from BSU.  She completed her graduated studies at Indiana University and the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University. 

Dr. Chang is the first American awarded First Prizes in both piano and chamber music during the same year from the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris.  As the first Artist-in-Residence at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., she participated in the development and launching of the Arts for Everyone Initiative. 

Dr. Chang grew up in Muncie and started her early music education in the classrooms and music programs of Burris Laboratory School with Dr. John Cooley (violin/orchestra) and Dr. Harold Caldwell (general music).  Beginning in elementary school, she enrolled in Applied Music at BSU and studied piano with Marianne Michael and later Pia Sebastiani, who taught her from the age of 9 until the completion of her undergraduate degree.  During that period, she also studied piano with Arminda Canteros (visiting professor).  She studied violin with Dr. John Cooley, and Professors Neil Weintraub and Patricia Tretick at Ball State and took applied ballet at BSU with Madame Elena Imaz de Bourgeot and Kay Knight.  Dr. Robert Hargreaves conducted her piano concerto debut (at age 12) with the Muncie Symphony Orchestra.  Dr. Change credits these teachers with exerting "a profound influence" on her "artistic development and interest in being an educator."  She is presently the head of Keyboard Studies, Coordinator of Chamber Music and Professor of Piano at Cleveland State University.