Molly Reid is a prize-winning pianist and an interdisciplinary scholar of music with a distinctive creative voice. Recognized for her powerful performances shaped by long, structural lines, her playing allows the music to unfold with ease and refreshing vitality. Her command of sound and style has consistently earned her numerous competition awards and distinctions. Most recently, she won prizes in the Ocean Music International Piano Concerto Competition and the Florida State University Doctoral Concerto Competition playing Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand. Her 2025-26 season-opening performance of the concerto with the Florida State University Symphony Orchestra conducted by Dr. Alexander Jiménez was broadcast live on PBS member station WFSU and rebroadcast on NPR member stations WFSQ, WFSL, and WFSU.
A versatile artist, Reid moves fluidly between canonical and underprogrammed repertoire. She maintains a deep interest in learning, performing, and teaching concert music by contemporary composers and by composers from marginalized backgrounds. Recent programs have included music by Margaret Bonds, Elena Kats-Chernin, Ann Southam, Kaija Saariaho, and Adolphus Hailstork. Her collaborations with composers include the commission and world premiere of Armero for solo piano by composer Nico Gutierrez in 2023. In 2026, she performed the North American premiere of Brazilian composer Arthur Barbosa’s piano concerto, Variações em busca de um tema de Matos Rodríguez (Variations searching for a theme by Matos Rodríguez) with the Florida State University Philharmonic Orchestra, led by conductor Guilherme Leal Rodrigues, with the composer in attendance.
As a scholar, Reid has presented papers and lecture-recitals at national and regional conferences across the United States. Her work has been published in the Journal of Music Theory Pedagogy and recognized with the Best Student Paper Award at the national Pedagogy into Practice Conference. In 2024, she was one of one hundred women doctoral students in the U.S. and Canada to receive the internationally competitive P.E.O. Scholar Award, which funded her archival research on German composer Luise Adolpha Le Beau. Her current research combines gesture and embodiment studies, feminist music theory, choreomusicology, and performance studies to analyze music by women composer-pianists from the nineteenth through twenty-first centuries.
Dr. Reid received her Doctor of Music in Piano Performance from Florida State University, where she is also a candidate for the Ph.D. in Music Theory. Reid holds degrees from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music (MM) and from Appalachian State University (BM, MM) in her home state of North Carolina. Her principal artistic mentors include Heidi Louise Williams and Rodney Reynerson, with additional study under Ney Fialkow, Junie Cho, Eugene Pridonoff, and Joyce Bubar. She has participated in master classes with artists including Boris Giltburg, Hung-Kuan Chen, Boris Berman, Émile Naoumoff, and Ksenia Nosikova.