Closing Reception with Veronica Leahy and Emmanuel Michael

“The Chickering Salon Series,” is a multi-week concert program produced by directors Fredericka King and Jamaal Bonnette complimenting “HARMONY: Art and Music at the Piano Factory,” a juried art exhibition of artwork inspired by and about music. "HARMONY: Art and Music at the Piano Factory" Closing Reception with Veronica Leahy and Emmanuel Michael

Veronica Leahy is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, and music director across a range of genres. She recently graduated summa cum laude from Harvard, having studied in the Dual Degree program with Berklee College of Music. Veronica continually seeks to expand the possibilities and boundaries of her craft.

As an undergraduate, Veronica composed four full-length original musicals. The most recent, Queen of Magic, premiered to sold-out audiences at the Loeb Ex theater in December of 2022. She served as the composer for Harvard’s iconic Hasty Pudding Theatricals for two seasons, and her debut musical at Harvard was Fake Moos, the annual First-Year Musical production. Her senior thesis American Tonic, a song cycle exploring chronic illness and the insulin crisis, received highest honors.

Seeking to foster open-minded dialogue around music composition and empower students to share their work regardless of genre or categorization, Veronica founded the Harvard Student Composer’s Festival. It brings together students and world-renowned composers alike to share and discuss original pieces and has become an annual event. Veronica also served as a music director for the Harvard-Radcliffe Gilbert & Sullivan Players and as music assistant for MacBeth in Stride at the American Repertory Theater (ART). Most recently, she co-music directed ART’s Little Amal Walks Across America.

Veronica received Harvard’s Sophia Freund Prize, the Radcliffe Doris Cohen Levi Prize, the Detur Book Prize, and was a John Harvard scholar. At Berklee, she was part of the Jazz and Gender Justice Institute and served as the lead alto saxophonist in the school’s premiere big band. As a jazz saxophonist, Veronica has appeared with artists such as Terri Lyne Carrington, Jon Batiste and Stay Human, and Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra. She has performed at such venues as Lincoln Center, Birdland, Dizzy’s Club, and 54 Below. She appears on the GRAMMY Award-winning album New Standards, Vol. 1.

Currently, she is part of the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop in New York.

Born and raised in South Dakota as a first-generation Ugandan and Southern Sudanese, Emmanuel is a New York City based artist who believes that self-identity can only be discovered through reflecting upon one’s surroundings with gratitude, self-reflection, and empathy.