Kirill Gerstein () (born 23 October 1979) is a Russian-American concert pianist. He is the sixth recipient of the Gilmore Artist Award. Born in the former Soviet Union, Gerstein is an American citizen based in Berlin. Between 2007-2017, he led piano classes at the Stuttgart Musik Hochschule. In 2018, he took up the post of Professor of Piano at the Hanns Eisler Hochschule in Berlin in addition to the Kronberg Academy’s Sir András Schiff Performance Programme for Young Artists. Early life and education Gerstein was born in Voronezh in the former Soviet Union to a Russian Jewish family and began playing the piano at the age of two. At the age of 12, he won his first competition - the International Bach Competition in Gorzów, Poland. Though he formally studied classical piano, he also learned to play jazz by listening to his parents' record collection. At the age of 14, he met jazz vibraphonist Gary Burton at a festival in St. Petersburg which led to a full-scholarship offer to study jazz piano at Boston's Berklee College of Music. Gerstein was the youngest student ever admitted to the school. Following his time at Berklee, Gerstein attended New York's Manhattan School of Music, where he studied with Solomon Mikowsky, earning both his Bachelor's and Master's of Music degrees in four years. He continued his studies in Madrid with Dmitri Bashkirov at Queen Sofía College of Music and in Budapest with Ferenc Rados. Career Kirill Gerstein made his major orchestral debut in September 2000 performing Brahms's Piano Concerto No. 1 with David Zinman and the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich and has since built a career as a major international concert artist. As a soloist, Gerstein has performed with the National Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles and New York Philharmonics, the Philadelphia and Minnesota Orchestras, and the Atlanta, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Indianapolis, Montreal, St. Louis, San Francisco, and Toronto Symphonies, among other North American orchestras. Abroad, he has performed with such orchestras as the Berlin, Czech, Munich, Rotterdam, and London Philharmonics, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, Staatskapelle Dresden, Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Tonkünstler Orchestra in Vienna, WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne, and the Zürich Tonhalle, as well as with the NHK Symphony Orchestra in Tokyo and the Taipei Symphony Orchestra. Gerstein's festival appearances include engagements with the Aspen Music Festival, Blossom Festival with the Cleveland Orchestra,