Pianist Tanya Bannister was born in Hong Kong and began to study the instrument at age five. Bannister took her undergraduate in piano studies from the Royal Academy of Music in London and finished at Yale with Claude Frank, although she took additional study with Richard Goode at Mannes College of Music. While at Yale, Bannister founded a chamber group, Trio Volante, which won the Weill Hall Debut Prize at the 1999 Norfolk Chamber Music Festival. As soloist, she has played with orchestras all over the world and won the Concert Artists Guild International Competition in 2003 and the Gold Medal at the New Orleans International Piano Competition in 2005. Her win was dampened somewhat by the subsequent hurricane and flood that leveled much of New Orleans, but Bannister elected to do something about it by joining three other players on a benefit tour entitled Pianists for New Orleans that are raising money to help victims of Hurricane Katrina. Tanya Bannister's first recording, a disc of Clementi sonatas for Naxos, was released early in 2006.