Rachel Taratoot Ciraldo
Musician and Non-Profit Champion
Over the past two decades, Rachel Taratoot Ciraldo has built her flute career through various avenues, including orchestral playing, chamber music projects and performances, collaborations and commissions, education, and administrative responsibilities. She views the arts from all perspectives, including performing, teaching, artistic direction, fundraising, marketing, and advocacy. The direct and indirect aspects of how the arts change the world for the better have inspired her career path allowing her to utilize all of her professional skills to the fullest.
Rachel’s creative career has been based in Hattiesburg, MS, since 2005, a central location to her orchestral positions. She has been the Principal Flutist of the Baton Rouge Symphony since 2005 and Meridian Symphony since 2013, having multiple solo concerto performances with both, and the Second Flutist for the Gulf Coast Symphony since 2009.
As a founding member of both Duo Cintemani, with guitarist and husband Nick Ciraldo, and Lagniappe Trio, with violist Christopher Lowry and harpist Stephanie Gustafson Amfahr, she has performed chamber music all over the US, US Virgin Islands, Italy and Brazil. She recently became co-creator of a chamber music collective based in Hattiesburg called Encompass. Its main mission is to promote all aspects of diversity, equity, and inclusion in classical music. Annually since 2017, she has created engaging and unique chamber music programs for FestivalSouth’s music series, an annual cultural arts festival in Hattiesburg, bringing the FestivalSouth Chamber Players to the forefront of classical performances in the region. Through these ensembles, she has participated in performance and educational residencies, most recently at the University of Wyoming in 2022, and has commissioned new compositions, all premiered in Mississippi.
Rachel serves as the Office Manager and Development Coordinator for the Hattiesburg Concert Association, an arts-based non-profit whose mission is to present meaningful, memorable, and educational arts programming to the Hattiesburg community and beyond. She uses her roles of fundraising and program creation to nurture and grow the cultural economy and effect change in her community, using music as a tool for advocacy, economic development, and improved quality of life.
Rachel has held several teaching positions, most recently as the visiting Flute Professor at Louisiana State University, a position she has held twice before as well as at the University of Southern Mississippi. She also taught at Southeastern Louisiana University from 2008-2012.
Rachel earned a BM from Indiana University where she studied with Thomas Robertello and MM from Boston University where she studied with Marianne Gedigian. Other primary teachers include Amy Porter, Jill Felber, Carl Hall, and Christina Smith. During a gap year between earning degrees, she performed with the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, a training institution with the Chicago Symphony. She is the third prize winner of the National Flute Association’s 2008 Young Artist Competition for which she also won the Award for the Best Performance of the Newly Commissioned Work. She is the first prize winner of the 2004 Byron Hester International Flute Competition, the 2000 James Pappoutsakis Competition, and the 1998 Mid-South Flute Festival’s Young Artist Competition.
Rachel also loves gardening, food, friends, and traveling.
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