Oboe

Andrea Plesnarski has been a member of Left Coast Chamber Ensemble for 15 years. She 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 groups. She is a graduate of the Curtis Institute 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.

Andrea earned an M.A. in Computer Science in 2001 from Mills College, Oakland. 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. She is an avid gardener and hopes to start doing landscape design professionally in the next year. Her favorite activity in the Bay Area is going on hikes and learning about native plants.

Andrea has been a musician board member with Oakland East Bay Symphony for the past 8 years. 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.