Undergraduate Student Mei Yin Steadman Receives the 2024-2025 GSI Foundation Classical Guitar Scholarship!

We are happy to announce the newest recipient of the GSI Foundation Classical Guitar Scholarship at the USC Thornton School of Music - Mei Yin Steadman.

Mei Yin Steadman, originally from Austin Texas, is currently a freshman at the University of Southern California. Growing up in her parents’ music school, Orpheus Academy of Music, seeing kids taking music lessons every day, she expressed her desire to learn to play music as soon as she could talk. She began taking guitar lessons with her dad at the age of four, before studying under Professor Adam Holzman throughout high school. She has also participated in masterclasses and festivals with David Russell, Jason Vieaux, Berta Rojas and Jiji Kim over the years. Currently, she studies with Professor Willaim Kannengiser at USC. She has won prizes in the solo divisions of the Southern Guitar Festival, Texas Guitar Festival, Houston Guitar Festival and the Asian American Competition. Outside solo playing, she was also a part of the ensemble with other young guitarists, the Orpheus Honors Guitar Quartet, who has placed in the ensemble division of the Southern Guitar Festival, been a finalist in NPR's "From the Top" program, and performed within and outside Texas.

We hope that the GSI Foundation scholarship will help Mei Yin with the costs of her classical guitar education, as it did in previous years for our scholars in the past: Juri Yun, Ashley Lucero, Mircea Gogoncea, Tomasz Fechner, Laura Mazon Franqui, Grygorii Koval, and Robert Wang. We’d like to thank countless donors who helped us by donating their guitars or cash to help raise funds for this and other purposes. If you'd like to learn how to help, please visit the GSI Foundation section of our website.

Mei Yin will visit our showroom for her first recording session next year. In the meantime, here is her performance of “Fantasia on a Theme from La Traviata” by Francisco Tarrega.