MARTHA CURTIS

Despite intractable epilepsy, Ms Curtis graduated salutatorian from The Interlochen Arts Academy, where she studied with Rosemary Malocsay, and with honors from the Eastman School of Music, where she studied with Charles Castleman. Up against a wall of seizures and medications, she found that an early arts education helped provide the core of her successful life strategies. With music and dance training, her mother provided a tool that required complex cognitive skill, a highly trained body, and the emotional expression of the human soul. With these abilities, Martha chose to coexist with her seizures as she struggled to win an identity as a musician.

Today, having defeated a liftetime of temporal lobe epilepsy with surgeries at the Cleveland Clinic, she delivers a universal message of persistence and determination through the musical prism of beauty and order. Upon hearing her recently, Charles Castleman of the Eastman School wrote, "The story of Martha Curtis's indomitable courage and achievement is inspiring and uplifting, a testament to the untapped possibilities of the human mind and will."

Martha has taught at Interlochen Arts Camp, West Liberty State College, as a graduate assistant at University of Akron, and in her private studios in West Virginia, Michigan, and here. She has performed with the Canton Symphony, Akron Symphony, Westmoreland Symphony, and Wheeling Symphony, and in such venues as The Kilbourne Series at The Eastman School of Music, the psychology department at Stanford University, and as a soloist with the Ohio Valley Symphony. She has been broadcast over National Public Radio, interviewed by the Associated Press, and profiled by 60 Minutes. She spent almost two decades presenting throughout the United States and the World performing recital-lectures of her story.