Regina Spektor

Vocation

American singer-songwriter and pianist. Her music is associated with the anti-folk scene centered on New York City's East Village. Spektor was born in Moscow, Soviet Union, in 1980 to a musical Russian Jewish family. Her father, Ilya Spektor, is a photographer and amateur violinist. Her mother, Bella Spektor, was a music professor in a Soviet college of music and now teaches at a public elementary school in Mount Vernon, New York. Regina learned how to play the piano by practicing on a Petrof upright that was given to her mother by her grandfather. She grew up listening to classical music and famous Russian bards. She was also exposed to rock-and-roll bands such as The Beatles, Queen, and The Moody Blues by her father, who obtained such recordings in Eastern Europe and traded cassettes with friends in the Soviet Union. The family left the Soviet Union in 1989, when Regina was nine and a half, during the period of Perestroika, when Soviet citizens were permitted to emigrate. Traveling first to Austria and then Italy, the Spektor family was admitted to the United States as refugees with the assistance of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. They settled in The Bronx, where Spektor graduated from the SAR Academy, a Jewish day middle school in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. In New York City, Spektor studied classical piano with Sonia Vargas, a professor at the Manhattan School of Music, until she was 17. (Please see the Wikiepdia link for extensive coverage of her career). Spektor married singer-songwriter Jack Dishel in 2011. Formerly a guitarist with the band The Moldy Peaches, Dishel is member of the band Only Son and duets with Spektor in the song "Call them Brothers". On 23 January 2014, Spektor announced her pregnancy on Facebook. Link to Wikipedia biography