Winner of the 17th International Beethoven Piano Competition, American pianist Derek Hartman enjoys a varied career as an internationally-renowned performer, a dedicated educator, and an enthusiastic advocate for music. He has performed on prominent stages across the United States and Europe, including the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. and the Golden Hall of the Musikverein in Vienna. In 2025, Mr. Hartman became the first American-born pianist to win the International Beethoven Piano Competition in Vienna since the event's founding in 1958. He also won top prizes in the Washington International Piano Competition, the Chicago International Music Competition, the PianoArts North American Competition, and the Music Teachers’ National Association Young Artist Piano Competition. He has appeared as a soloist with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, and the Clara Schumann Philharmonic (Germany). An avid chamber musician, Mr. Hartman has collaborated with internationally renowned artists including violist Jordan Bak and flutist András Adorján, and he is a regular Faculty-Artist of the ContemporArt Chamber Music Festival in Satu Mare, Romania. He has performed chamber music as a fellow of the Bowdoin International Music Festival and frequently appears in concert series across the United States. Mr. Hartman’s musical interests are not limited to the classical piano sphere, as his eclectic musical background includes training and experience in jazz, popular music, improvisation, composition, music theory, and continuo performance. He is dedicated to performing and promoting music of our time, and he has collaborated with such composers as Lila Meretzsky, Benjamin Webster, Derek Bermel, and Michael Slayton. Mr. Hartman is a Bösendorfer Artist.

A fierce advocate for the close relationship between the performance and pedagogy disciplines, Mr. Hartman is a devoted music educator with over fifteen years of studio teaching experience. Since 2024, he has served as Lecturer of Piano at the Blair School of Music at Vanderbilt University. He is an alumnus of the Post-Graduate Teaching Program at the New School for Music Study in Kingston, New Jersey, where he taught piano from 2023 to 2024, and he is an active member of the Frances Clark Center for Keyboard Pedagogy. Mr. Hartman is equally at home as an instructor in classroom and group environments. He was a teaching assistant of music theory at the Yale School of Music from 2020 to 2023. Since 2018, he has partnered with PianoArts of Wisconsin to design and present dozens of music educational programs across the city of Milwaukee. Mr. Hartman embraces a dynamic and multidimensional approach to teaching; he encourages holistic musicianship in students of all levels and aspirations by integrating traditional pedagogical methods, concepts from the music academic fields, and elements from his wide-ranging musical background.

Mr. Hartman is currently a Doctor of Musical Arts candidate at the Yale School of Music. He received a Masters of Music from Yale and a Bachelor of Music Performance in Piano Performance and a minor in music theory from the Bienen School of Music at Northwestern University. Mr. Hartman studied under the tutelage of Boris Slutsky, Dr. James Giles, Dr. Paul Wirth, and Dr. Sarah Miller. Additional teachers and mentors include Boris Berman, Dr. Wei-Yi Yang, Tom Rosenberg, Dr. Vasili Byros, Dr. Seth Monahan, Dr. Paul Berry, Carol Andersen, and Brian Lukkasson. He was born and raised in the Twin Cities metro area of Minnesota, and he is currently based in Nashville, Tennessee.