Wendy Cilman

Wendy Cilman, Director of Education

Wendy Cilman has been the Director of Education for the Santa Rosa Symphony since 2015. She was enticed to move to Santa Rosa from Oakland by Simply Strings, an El-Sistema inspired after-school program, and by the scope and range of all the twelve of the SRS Institute for Music Education programs.

In Oakland, she founded IDEA, Institute for the Development of Education in the Arts, a non-profit to connect seniors and children through the arts.

As the first Executive Director of Young People’s Symphony Orchestra, the oldest youth orchestra in California and the second-oldest in the country, she took the 100-member orchestra on four tours, three of them international. In 2009 she started the Bay Area Youth Orchestra Festival (BAYOF Hope), a benefit for homeless youth that has raised over $200,000 and is now presented by San Francisco Symphony.

As a performing cellist, her first professional gig was as section cellist for Santa Rosa Symphony, for nine years when Corrick Brown was conductor. Her primary cello instructors were Irving Klein and Michael Grebanier, and she studied chamber music with the legendary Bernard Abramowitsch and Felix Khuner. She loves teaching and has eight private students.