Jeffrey Sharkey

Pianist, composer and veteran music educator Jeffrey Sharkey became director of the Peabody Institute, the music school of The Johns Hopkins University, on Sept. 1, 2006.

He is responsible both for 650 undergraduates and graduate students in the institute's conservatory and for the Peabody Preparatory, a community music and dance school serving 1,800 students from early childhood through adulthood.

Before coming to Peabody, Sharkey had been dean of the Cleveland Institute of Music since 2001, serving as the chief academic officer of its college division. He was director of music at the Purcell School in London from 1996 to 2001 and head of composition and academic music at Wells Cathedral School, also in England, from 1990 to 1996.

He is a 1986 graduate of the Manhattan School of Music and earned a master of music degree in composition from Yale University in 1988 and a master of philosophy from Cambridge University a year later. His teachers have included pianists John Browning, Boris Berman and Peter Frankl and composers Aaron Copland and John Corigliano.

Sharkey was a founding member of the Pirasti Piano Trio, which recorded with ASV Records in the United Kingdom and toured throughout Europe and the United States. Since returning to America, he has played in Trio Zannetti and performed regularly with members of the Cleveland Orchestra and Cleveland Institute faculty. His compositions have been performed by the St. Louis Symphony under the direction of Leonard Slatkin and in chamber concerts in the United States and Britain.

[Updated September 2006]