Vanessa Cornett-Murtada is the director of keyboard studies at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, where she teaches piano and piano pedagogy. An international clinician, she has lectured throughout the United States and in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Italy, Serbia, Croatia and Taiwan. She has published papers in the Journal of Undergraduate Neuroscience Education and Cultural Politics and book chapters in the fourth edition of Creative Piano Teaching. A certified hypnotherapist, she specializes in the treatment of performance anxiety for musicians. Her current research focuses on mindfulness and the nature of human consciousness in the performing arts.

Kathleen Riley, Ph.D., is known nationally as a lecturer and clinician on musicians’ technique and injury prevention. She has more than 30 years of piano teaching experience, training in biofeedback techniques, and research in biofeedback and music performance with musicians. Riley has worked with specialists in different retraining therapies and has developed her own method. She is the music performance and rehabilitation specialist for the Yamaha Music and Wellness Institute and clinical director of ProformaVision. She has been invited to join the first comprehensive, interdisciplinary, medically based, world-wide performance enhancement and treatment network for musicians. She is a widely published author.

Julie Jaffee Nagel is a graduate of the Juilliard School, the University of Michigan and the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute. Her work on performance anxiety, music as a point of entry into emotion and unconscious processes, and music as an instrument of social change and mental health outreach has been published in peer-reviewed journals. She is the recipient of several prestigious awards and is co-chair of the American Psychoanalytic Association’s Committee on Psychoanalysis and the Arts and chair of Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Music. Nagel is on the faculties of Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute and is in private practice. She writes a blog, “Music to my Ears” in Psychology Today online and has a soon-to-be-published book, “Melodies of the Mind."

Linda Cockey is professor of music at Salisbury University in Maryland, where she has team taught with a psychologist and athletic trainer a wellness course for more than 15 years that focuses on teaching techniques for peak performance and injury prevention. She began working on the Annotated Bibliography of Wellness Resources for MTNA in 1997, annually updating this valuable online database into the pedagogical research tool it is today. She has presented her research as a member of the wellness committee for the National Keyboard Conference on Keyboard Pedagogy and has given presentations at the Hoff-Barthelson Music School, Scarsdale, New York, the 2003 Maryland State Music Teacher’s State Convention and MTNA’s 2002 National Convention in Salt Lake City.