Barbara A. Celkupa Herrick grew up on the Connecticut shoreline where she began piano studies at age four, followed by composition studies at the Yale School of Music in New Haven, CT. At seventeen, after piano studies at Aix-en-Provence in France, she entered the Hartt College of Music in Hartford, CT as a piano and composition major.
She received a Bachelor of Music Degree from The Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, where she studied with Walter Hautzig and in master classes with Leon Fleisher. She was awarded a scholarship to The Juilliard School of Music in New York City where she received a Master of Music Degree in Piano performance and studied with Abbey Simon
She was on the staff at Juilliard for a number of years and taught in the New York metropolitan area. She also taught piano at the Ukrainian Music Institute and was an opera coach and piano teacher at the Conservatory of the Mimar Sinan University in Istanbul, Turkey.
