Andrea Plesnarski

Oboe

Andrea Plesnarski is Principal oboist of the Oakland East Bay Symphony and Fremont Symphony. She performed as a regular substitute member of the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra and is a freelancer with several Bay Area orchestral and chamber music performing groups. She has been a performing member of Left Coast Chamber Ensemble for 18 years. She is a graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia where she studied with John de Lancie and Richard Woodhams.

She has participated in many summer festivals including Tanglewood, Pacific Music Festival in Japan, Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival in Germany, and Spoleto Music Festival in Italy. Ms. Plesnarski has won the Florida Orchestra, Savannah Symphony and Carmel Music Society Competitions.

In 1998, Ms. Plesnarski enrolled at Mills College, Oakland in the Computer Science program and was granted an M.A. in Computer Science in 2001. Her thesis focus was the creation of a human interface to allow the user to compose and play music using a piezo sensor gestural interface utilizing software with neural networks and Markov models. She is Lead Software Engineer at SoftwareAG in Alviso, CA. SoftwareAG is based in Darmstadt, Germany.

In 2009, she received certificates in Landscape Horticulture and Landscape Design and Construction from Merritt College. Ms. Plesnarski is a dedicated gardener and hopes to start doing landscape design professionally in the future. Her favorite activity in the Bay Area is going on hikes and learning about native plants.

Ms. Plesnarski serves as a musician board member with Oakland East Bay Symphony and a musician board member for Left Coast Ensemble. She has volunteered with Students Run Oakland for several seasons, running the L.A. Marathon with Oakland high school students. An avid runner, she ran the 2012 Paris Marathon on her birthday. She now volunteers as a garden mentor with City Slicker Farms in Oakland which enables residents of West Oakland to grow their own local, healthy food and coaches with Run for a Better Oakland with K-4th graders.