Mandee Sikich completed her MM degree in Collaborative Piano in 2014 with Robert Koenig at UCSB where she was the recipient of a full-tuition music department fellowship. She also studied chamber music with Yuval Yaron. Mandee is the recipient of various awards including the Musician of the Year award (The Master’s College), the Christopher Parkening Scholarship for Excellence in Musical Performance, and the Estella Mays Memorial Award for Piano Performance. She has toured extensively to Italy, Germany, Israel, and Russia as a choral accompanist and served as the Westmont College Choir pianist from 2011 to 2014. She has maintained a private teaching studio in Santa Barbara since 2010 and is serving as the vice-president of the Santa Barbara Branch of the MTAC for the 2015-2016 season. Mandee has also worked as a music director for various theater companies in Santa Barbara including Elements Theatre Collective and Out of The Box Theatre Co. Her music direction credits Tom Greenwald Andrew Lippa’s John and Jen, Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins and Duncan Sheik’s and Steven Sater’s Spring Awakening for which she received an Indy Award for Music Direction in May 2012. She has spent the past eight years accompanying various opera productions in the Los Angeles area and has also collaborated with numerous vocalists and instrumentalists for recitals, competitions, and recordings. This summer she studied for six weeks in Austria as a Lieder Studio pianist for the American Institute of Musical Studies in Graz.