Anna Rosales Medina – Chromatic Music Academy

was born in San Antonio, Texas, and spent her early years in Bedford and Aledo, Texas, near Fort Worth. Her family moved to Fairhope, Alabama – a small town across the Bay from Mobile and near the Gulf of Mexico – when she was 11.

She started playing the piano when she was in third grade and continued through high school. She also played the french horn in middle and high school, participated as an alto in her church’s choir, and danced ballet.

Her first visit to the Bay Area was in the spring of 2008, after having been admitted to Stanford University, where she would pursue her undergraduate degree and double-major in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing and Iberian and Latin American Cultures.

She continued dancing in college, though she focused on social dancing (swing, waltz, salsa, etc) instead of ballet and was part of the Viennese Ball Opening Ceremony as well as a teacher’s assistant for social dance classes.

She graduated in 2012 and pursued her Master’s in Education at Stanford as part of the Stanford Teacher Education Program (STEP) the following year; during her graduate studies, she was particularly drawn to the incorporation of interdisciplinary approaches in curriculum design.

Her favorite lesson she designed was one that wove together poetry, music and the art of the Harlem Renaissance while at the same time teaching the necessary core concepts of critical analysis and generalizing those concepts to the different mediums.

After a brief (and, frankly, stressful) period teaching in public schools, she decided to return to her love of writing and pursued a career in journalism. She most recently worked at The Palo Alto Weekly before deciding to focus her time on raising her two boys who – for now – keep her very busy.

Her current hobbies and interests include reading, knitting, cooking, watercolor painting, and studying ancient Hellenistic astrology in her (somewhat limited) downtime.