Inna Faliks is a Ukrainian-American classical pianist, educator, and author.
A touring concert pianist and a Yamaha artist, she holds the posts of Professor of Piano and Head of Piano at the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music. She has made many concert tours performing both classical and contemporary works around the world, as a soloist and with orchestras.
Faliks was born in 1978 in Odessa, in today's Ukraine but then part of the Soviet Union. She started piano lessons at the age of five with her piano-teacher mother, Irene Faliks. To escape antisemitism, Faliks (age 10) and her family emigrated as refugees from Odessa to Chicago, with a two-month interim stay in Rome.
In 2008 she founded a poetry-music series in New York City for the Manhattan Arts Council called Music/Words, which she also curated. It featured classical music performances and live poetry readings.
In the late 2000s and early 2010s she commuted between New York and Chicago as a member of the Northeastern Illinois University piano faculty in Chicago.
In 2013 she joined the UCLA faculty, where she is Professor of Piano and Head of Piano. That year she co-starred with Lesley Nicol in two performances of "Admission – One Shilling," a play for pianist and actor based on the life of British pianist Dame Myra Hess.
Faliks has toured with an autobiographical monologue-recital, "Polonaise-Fantasie: The Story of a Pianist." Delos Records issued a recording of the show in 2017.
