Daniel Inamorato
Artist
Concert Pianist . Harpsichordist . Pedagogue
Butoh Performer. Instrument Collector . Entrepreneur
I was born in Santo André (São Paulo-Brasil) in February 2, 1987. My first contact with music making happened through my sister Viviane Louro, eight years older than me. She started learning the piano as a means to develop her hand musculature, due the fact she was born with a non-identified physical disability. Her passion for arts and philosophy and her persistence in practicing the piano up to 13 hours a day naturally develop in me an intense passion for music and the interest in playing the instrument at a very early age.
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Finding good piano instructors took some persistence, but our mother Sueli Inamorato eventually found excellent teachers that were very influential in my life. My most important mentors were Luciana Sayuri Shimabuco, the most caring, organized and sensible teacher I have ever met, and Marisa Rosana Lacorte, the person who taught me the meaning and importance of agogic and how to work on having depth in cantabile. They are indelible inspirations in my life to this day, and I am thankful to the fact they were able to successfully navigate my young learner strong personality.
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Thanks to their dedication, I was able to perform my first concert with an Orchestra at age 9 and win more than 40 piano Competitions in my teens. Later on I was privileged to study with great pianists Alexandre Zamith, Rogerio Zaghi and Eduardo Monteiro. One of the highlights of my teens was my piano four hands duo with Daniel Goncalves called Duo Cantabile. We performed yearly at Concert Series in Sao Paulo and won the chamber music competition at Londrina Musica Festival that allowed us to tour and perform in many cities at Parana state.
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At age 14, I started working my first job as piano accompanist of choirs at Fundacao das Artes de Sao Caetano do Sul. When I was 17 I started working as a page turner at the concert series at Fundação Maria Luiza e Oscar Americano and eventually I became the Producer of the series. At 18 I started working as faculty at Estação Especial da Lapa teaching students with special needs, and at 20 I started teaching at Projeto Guri Santa Marcelina. During that same period I also worked as a piano accompanist at the studio of tenor Benito Maresca, while working on my undergraduate degree in piano performance at University of São Paulo.
I then met pianist Arnaldo Cohen while participating in a piano competition in the city of Uberlândia. He was judging the competition alongside pianists Flavio Augusto and Gilberto Tinetti, and afterwords professor Cohen invited me to apply as a student at the prestigious Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University. I had no doubt that this would be a life changing experience, so I quit all my jobs as a teacher and producer, learned English as fast as humanly possible, and a few months later started a new life in the United States, in the year 2011.
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Indiana University offered me the highest scholarship and fellowship they have, and I was fortunate to have seven semesters of full tuition to study with professor Cohen and also professor Jean-Louis Hagenauer, completing a Performer Diploma and a Master Degree in Music. There, I also learned from professors Edmund Battersby. Emile Naoumoff, David Baker, Carol Vaness and other brilliant musicians.
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While at IU I met Dr. Karen Taylor and, as a student at her excellent piano pedagogy class, she saw me teaching and offered me a job at her prestigious Young Pianists Program. She was particularly interested in my previous experience working with atypical learners, and so really unexpectedly I became the wild card of her program, teaching an average of 15 students per semester, many of them on the autism spectrum and neurodivergent. While working at IU, I was also hired as piano accompanist at the DePauw University in Greencastle; where I worked until 2019.
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At Indiana University I met my husband Brady Kent Lanier, an excellent Early Music performer and professional arranger. In 2018 he was hired as full time Viola da Gamba performer at Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia; and I joined him moving to VA in 2019 to take my chances in a new region of the US. At this new phase I have so far worked at Christopher Newport University; Hampton University; Colonial Williamsburg; as Artist in Residence at University of North Carolina School of the Arts; and now as Adjunct Lecturer of Applied Music in Piano at University of William & Mary.
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