Inna Faliks is a Ukrainian-American classical pianist, educator, and author.
A touring concert pianist and a Yamaha artist, she holds the posts of Professor of Piano and Head of Piano[1] at the
UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. She has made many concert tours performing both classical and contemporary works around the world, as a soloist and with orchestras.[2][3]
Faliks was born in 1978 in
Odessa, in today's
Ukraine[6] but then part of the
Soviet Union. She started piano lessons at the age of five with her piano-teacher mother, Irene Faliks.[7] To escape
antisemitism,[1] Faliks (age 10) and her family emigrated as refugees[8] from Odessa to Chicago, with a two-month interim stay in
Rome.[9]
In 2008 she founded a poetry-music series in New York City for the Manhattan Arts Council called Music/Words, which she also curated.[14] It featured classical music performances and live poetry readings.[12]
In the late 2000s and early 2010s she commuted between New York and Chicago as a member of the
Northeastern Illinois University piano faculty in Chicago.[12][15]
In 2013 she joined the
UCLA faculty,[14] where she is Professor of Piano and Head of Piano.[1] That year she co-starred with
Lesley Nicol in two performances of "Admission – One Shilling," a play for pianist and actor based on the life of British pianist
Dame Myra Hess.[16]
Faliks has toured with an autobiographical monologue-recital, "Polonaise-Fantasie: The Story of a Pianist."[7][17] Delos Records issued a recording of the show in 2017.