Joost Vanmaele

Joost Vanmaele is a Belgian pianist, researcher and pedagogue who studied at the Bruges Municipal Conservatory, the Royal Conservatory of Ghent, the Royal Flemish Conservatory of Antwerp, the Staatliche Musikhochschule Freiburg, the Orpheus Institute Ghent and Leiden University.

Following the personal confrontation with a chronic neuro-motor deficit in 1995, Joost Vanmaele’s musical career took a new and decisive turn in the direction of instrumental didactics and research, leading to meta-practical questions about the impact of extra-disciplinary information on musical practice in general and the performance of composed music in particular. Joost Vanmaele holds a doctoral degree from Leiden University (Academy of Creative and Performing Arts, docARTES programme) with a dissertation entitled The Informed Performer: towards a bio- culturally informed performers’ practice (2017).

Joost Vanmaele has been artistic staff member at the Orpheus Institute in Ghent from 2006 to 2010 and the first research coordinator of the Orpheus Research Centre in Music (2007-2010). He currently teaches at the Conservatory of his hometown where he is chair of the piano-department, and he is a professor at the School of Arts in Ghent in the domain of keyboard didactics and educational research in the arts. Joost Vanmaele is a docARTES-coordinator and faculty member and is also active as a member of the editorial board of Forum+ for Research in the Arts, the peer-reviewed journal for research and arts in the Lowlands.

His docARTES doctoral defense took place on December 20, 2017 at Leiden University.