Piano & Violin Faculty

Estella received her B.A. in Music from UC Santa Cruz, with an emphasis on piano performance, and was awarded the Hortense Zuckerman Prize for excellence in performance and scholarship. She studied under Maria Ezerova, delving into the music of Bach, Chopin, and Debussy, among others. During her time there, she jointly studied violin under Roy Malan and performed with numerous ensembles, including celtic, mariachi, and jazz, on the violin. Before that, she studied for over ten years in her hometown of Santa Barbara under Lana Bodnar and Nina Bodnar, on piano and violin, respectively. She accompanied on piano for vocalists and instrumentalists through the years and played keyboard for a high school production of Into the Woods musical last winter. Most recently, she debuted a vocal and small ensemble composition at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, as part of the Youth Ensemble Program.

She believes in building a great foundation through teaching the right habits for good technique and, simultaneously, infusing fun in playing music. Learning to feel music intuitively and as a way of telling a story is a mindset that she hopes her students can absorb from the beginning, while learning the fundamentals of rhythm, note reading, and more. For advancing students, her goal is to help hone their technique with scales and etudes and explore the rich repertoire of the different eras of classical music, as the focus of teaching. If the student chooses, she hopes to maintain an open door to other non-Western art traditions of music, be it through a piece picked as part of the repertoire or the way of approaching music, like improvisation.