Piano performer | Stress management | Art as personal development

María José Cid

Biography

Between technique and inner listening

María José Cid

PhD from the University of Vigo and Professor of Piano at the Conservatorio Superior de Música de Vigo, her career weaves together three strands that rarely meet so naturally: performance, teaching, and research into the relationship between music, body and mind.

More than three decades of career have allowed her to develop her own outlook on piano teaching, in which technique, expression and psychological balance are not understood as separate compartments but as a single breath. This conviction shapes the course she teaches on emotional and physical control applied to public performance, where the management of stage fright is approached from a crossing of disciplines.

“Artistic excellence and personal well-being do not compete — they sustain one another.”

Her training combines advanced studies in Piano and Chamber Music with the Performance Diploma (High Honours) from the Guildhall School, along with further studies with Ludovica Mosca and Luiz de Moura Castro, and contact with figures such as Alicia de Larrocha, Blanca Uribe, Alain Motard and Anna Jastrzębska, among others. Alongside this, she has deepened her knowledge of body-based techniques such as the Alexander Technique and Eutony, as well as mindfulness and emotional intelligence, building a profile that is at once artistic and pedagogical.

As a performer she has appeared in Spain, Italy, Switzerland and Portugal, and remains active in chamber music and as an accompanying pianist. Among her most recent 2026 projects are recitals in Florence and at the Auditorium of the Conservatorio Superior de Vigo, as well as an educational concert at IES Celso Emilio Ferreiro in Celanova focused on the creative process and inspiration.

Her work extends internationally through courses and workshops on stress management applied to musical performance, taught at universities and conservatories in Portugal, Italy, Albania and Croatia, as well as at UNED, where she recently taught the course “Well-being as a Way of Life”. Her work is guided by a vision of performance as an integral experience, in which artistic excellence and personal well-being are conceived as inseparable dimensions.

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