Adjudicators 2025

Margaret Pressley has served as one of the country’s foremost instructors of pre-college musicians. Ms. Pressley established the Pressley Violin Studio and founded the Seattle Conservatory of Music, the first of its kind in the Pacific Northwest. For her exceptional support, inspiration, and outstanding contributions toward the growth and development of music education, Ms. Pressley has received numerous honors, including a Music Teachers National Association’s National Fellow Award, a Washington State Outstanding Studio Teacher of the Year Award (American String Teacher Association), and a prestigious Dorothy Richard Starling Violin Foundation Grant. She has been formally inducted into the Washington State Music Teacher Association Hall of Fame.

Ms. Pressley’s Conservatory and Studio students have been accepted into every major collegiate music school in the country and have worked as chamber musicians, orchestral players, international soloists, professors of violin, and free-lance musicians across North America and Europe. Ms. Pressley has served as a Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Colorado Boulder, a Lecturer at Western Washington University, and as an Adjunct Professor at Seattle Pacific University. She has also served as a Master Teacher at Indiana University’s Summer String Academy, the Heifetz Institute, Schlern International Music Festival (Italy), the Nationalla Ungdomssymfoniorchestern (Stockholm, Sweden), and the New Conservatory of Dallas Music in the Mountains Music Festival. Ms. Pressley has led master classes and clinics in state and national conferences and has served on regional and national advisory panels. Currently she resides in Colorado Springs, CO where she directs the Colorado Springs Youth Symphony’s Collegiate Performance Preparation Program.

Prior to joining the piano faculty at Western Washington University, Jeffrey Gilliam taught at The Juilliard School; The University of Michigan School of Music; and at The International Menuhin Music Academy in Gstaad, Switzerland. He has performed and taught all over the world, including guest university teaching positions in Thailand and South Africa, as well as receiving two Fulbright awards. He has recorded with violinists Yehudi Menuhin, Alberto Lysy, and Ruggerio Ricci for the EMI, Dinemec Classics, and Opus 111 labels respectively.

Originally from Akron, Ohio, Jeffrey Gilliam studied piano with Cécile Genhart at The Eastman School of Music, and with Theodore Lettvin at The University of Michigan. He also studied collaborative piano with Martin Katz and Margo Garrett. He has performed in master classes for Leon Fleisher, György Sebök, John Perry, Maria Curcio Diamand, Tatiana Nikolayeva, György Sandor, and Dorothy Taubman. In addition to teaching piano and collaborative piano at Western, he is Artistic Director of Western’s Sanford-Hill Piano Series. In 2015 he established the Jeffrey Gilliam Piano Scholarship Endowment Fund. His students have gone on to distinguished piano performance programs at Stony Brook, New England Conservatory, Rice University, and Eastman.

Pianist Renato Fabbro was awarded the Doctor of Musical Arts degree from Rice University. He studied with Larry Graham, Angela Cheng and John Perry and won the Adeline Rosenberg Memorial First Prize at the Fort Collins Symphony National Young Artist Competition, as well as first prize in the Grand Junction Symphony National Young Artist Competition. He has judged many competitions and festivals throughout the U.S. and his students are frequent prize winners in national, regional and state competitions. They have also appeared as soloists with various orchestras.

Dr. Fabbro is a member of the artistic advisory panel for the Bellevue Symphony and Pacific International Piano Competitions. As part of the Martingale Ensemble, he recorded music of Claude Debussy and Gustav Mahler with members of the Oregon Symphony on the MSR Classics label. He has taught at several colleges, including the University of Portland and Marylhurst University, and his students have been accepted into top piano performance degree programs such as the Eastman School of Music, Indiana University, Peabody Conservatory, Cleveland Institute of Music and Rice University Shepherd School of Music.

Praised for her “impressive artistry” and “wonderful bowing technique” (San Francisco Classical Voice), French cellist Juliette Herlin has performed throughout Europe, the U.S., Asia, and South America. As a soloist, chamber musician, and recitalist, she has appeared in prestigious venues such as the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, the Musée du Louvre, and the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris; the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.; Alice Tully Hall in New York; and the Zhuhai and Chongqing Grand Theaters in China.

Dr. Herlin is the cellist of the Aletheia Piano Trio alongside pianist Fei-Fei and violinist Francesca dePasquale. She has been invited to give masterclasses at Oberlin Conservatory, the University of Michigan, UNT, Baylor, University of Houston, and Utah State, as well as abroad in China, Mexico, and Colombia. Dr. Herlin is Assistant Professor of Cello at Texas Christian University’s School of Music. Her performances are frequently featured on NPR’s Performance Today, WFMT, KUSC, and France Musique, France’s main classical music station. She studied at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris, the Juilliard School, and the University of Southern California. Dr. Herlin was recently named a Bärenreiter Jubilee Ambassador.