Flutist, Educator, and Collaborator
Who is Cristina Ballatori?
Cristina Ballatori has performed across the United States, Europe, England, and Latin America as a recitalist, soloist, chamber and orchestral musician. Recent performance highlights include featured guest artist appearances at the Festivales Internacionales de Flautistas in Lima, Peru, and World Flutes Festival in Mendoza, Argentina, concerts in venues such as the Atelier Concert Series in Paris, France, and artist residencies in Spain, Costa Rica, and Mexico. An active chamber musician, Ballatori is a member of the Semplice Duo with pianist Kevin Chance and the Whitewater Chamber Players. Described by critics as “delightful performers” whose “music making was effortless and sparkling,” the Semplice Duo was formed in 2000 with the goal of exposing a wide variety of audiences to the less frequently performed chamber music for flute and piano. Their debut album, Night Surrendering to the Dawn, will be released by Centaur Records in 2024-2025, and features works for flute and piano by 21st Century composers Valerie Coleman, Amanda Harberg, and Samuel Zyman, including two world-premiere recordings of works written for the duo by Christian Ellenwood. Ballatori regularly appears as a guest artist and has been a featured performer, clinician, and adjudicator at many festivals, universities, and conferences including those of the National Flute Association, Music Teachers National Association, Texas Music Educators Association, and Mid-South Flute Society among others. She is a Burkart Artist.
A sought-after and dedicated teacher, Dr. Ballatori is the newly appointed Assistant Professor of Flute at the University of Arkansas and will join the music faculty in Fall 2024. She previously served as Associate Professor of Flute at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater (UW-W) and the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV). At UTRGV, she was one of fifteen tenure track professors within the sixteen University of Texas System schools to receive the Regents’ Outstanding Award, a $25,000 award, recognizing extraordinary classroom performance and innovation in instruction. Her students have been named winners and finalists in local, state, regional, and national competitions, including those sponsored by the National Flute Association and Texas Association of Music Schools, and have been accepted into top summer festivals and graduate programs. Under Ballatori's direction, the UTRGV Flute Choir and Flautarra Ensemble enjoyed the university's first invitations to appear as featured performers at the National Flute Association Convention, Texas Music Educators Association Convention, and Texas Flute Festival. In 2022, the UW-W Flute Ensemble received the university’s first invitation to perform at the National Flute Association Convention in over thirty years. Dr. Ballatori loves working with enthusiastic and dedicated students of all ages, and maintains a small private studio in addition to her duties at the university.
Interviews
The Flute Examiner
Performing, working with students, mentoring students, and seeing them go out into the world after graduation and positively impacting their own communities—each of these gives me great joy. However, many of things that fill my heart now have little to do with music.
Flute Talk
Although I could not see my path moving forward at the time, that period proved to be a positive turning point in my life and career. The person I was before that experience was very different from the person I grew into during the years following it.