Chandra (pronounced “Shaun-dra”) fell in love with music before she was born on January 9, 2000 and realized she didn’t know her own birth date at age five when her first-grade teacher asked her.

She thrived in piano lessons and survived elementary school despite not knowing English at the time and mispronouncing words like “prairie dog” (“perry dog”), “Arizona” (“Are-ih-zona”), and thinking that someone was calling for her whenever they said “genre.”

In middle school, Chandra regularly fed wild squirrels cereal and cheese, which attracted a stray cat that lived under her parents’ deck that gave birth to four kittens, two of which her family kept plus the mom cat. She still doesn’t understand why her mom thought it was a good idea to name the kittens Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and MIT.

Chandra is allergic to cats.

Her parents moved closer to Boulder, CO when Chandra was twelve so she could attend a college prep high school where she waltzed through classrooms and offices to chat with teachers and admin, asking them questions and listening to their stories of faking giving birth in a car to get out of traffic and accidentally fatally overfeeding a pet cat in an attempt to make it onto the Guinness Book of World Records.

When English started feeling too comfortable, Chandra traveled to Oregon, Oklahoma, Cuba, and India to intensively learn the musical phrases of Hindi, Russian, Spanish, and Swahili for free. Her favorite language is Russian because its long melodic phrases sound like Chopin to her.

Fueled by visions of concert halls, quirky characters, and pure joy, Chandra spent three years at NYU and came out with degrees in Piano Performance and Journalism. 

She loved NYU so much that she started her master’s there in Screen Scoring and graduated in May 2024.