Cheryl Tan is a pianist, fortepianist, researcher, and lecturer whose work explores keyboard culture of the long nineteenth century. 

She holds a doctorate from Cornell University, where she studied historical performance practice and completed her dissertation, Clara Wieck and her Piano Variations: Postclassical Pianism of the 1830s, supervised by Xak Bjerken, Natasha Loges, Roger Moseley, and James Webster. Cheryl previously studied in Britain, graduating from the University of Oxford with First Class and the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama with Distinction. Her principal piano teachers include Malcolm Bilson, Xak Bjerken, John Byrne, Victor Sangiorgio, and Michael Young.

Cheryl teaches across performance and academic disciplines. She is a Lecturer in Piano at the University of Southampton, Senior Associate Teacher (Piano Performance) at the University of Bristol, and Visiting Tutor (Musicology) at the University of Oxford. She has presented papers, recitals, and lecture-recitals internationally on both modern and historical pianos. Her research has appeared in Nineteenth-Century Music Review, with forthcoming articles in Music Analysis and Stiftung Kloster Michaelstein proceedings.

Cheryl has recently completed a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at Trinity College Dublin, where her project, Revisiting Clara Wieck(-Schumann): Virtuosity, Identity, and Lost Repertory, examined the postclassical milieu at the intersection of performance, analysis, and historical-cultural study.

Shaped by her experiences as a pianist and scholar, Cheryl’s research into lost pianistic traditions and the works of women composers seeks to bring scholarship and practice into mutually illuminating dialogue. Her work engages audiences through performance, research-led concert programming, and educational initiatives across the UK and Ireland.