Meet our staff

Owner & Founder

As the owner and founder of Park Street Piano, Becca May Grant takes pride in coaching every student toward excellence. She enjoys challenging students of all abilities to think creatively, to expand their musical boundaries, and to bring their unique selves to the music.

Becca leads the Worship Arts Ministry at Fountain of Life Covenant Church, a multicultural, Black-led church on the south side of Madison. She loves to collaborate with other musicians and artists in leading worship, whether playing in the band, directing the choir, singing with a team, or planning and executing creative, inspiring worship services.

Becca trained from childhood as a classical pianist and accompanist and studied jazz piano at UW-Madison with Joan Wildman. She has written for and performed with various contemporary gospel and jazz ensembles. Her compositions for vocal ensemble draw on gospel, jazz, and classical choral repertoire, with emphasis on collaboration. In 2016, Becca recorded Beauty for Ashes Live, an album of original compositions for contemporary gospel vocal ensemble.

Becca currently serves as the music director for Wisconsin’s annual statewide Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Tribute and Ceremony. She has taught general music in the Madison public schools, is an instructor with Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestra’s Music Makers program, and has extensive experience teaching individual lessons to children and adults of all ages and abilities.

Becca lives on the south side of Madison with her family and her vegetable garden

Born and raised in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, Zach Studdiford has benefited from a rich jazz and classical tradition that offered the opportunity to learn from masters such as Bryan Nichols, Javier Santiago, Omar Abdul-Karim, Kevin Washington, and Emmet Cohen. As a local performing artist in both Madison and Minneapolis, he has recorded and released two albums, writing numerous original compositions for both.

Zach has previously taught piano as a private instructor for Opus Music Academy, working with a wide range of ages and abilities from elementary to adult level. He also had the opportunity to further develop his method of instruction under the guidance of esteemed performer and educator William Duncan, who he worked with as an instructor at Walker West Music Academy for two years.

Now pursuing his bachelor’s degree at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Zach continues to study and perform jazz piano under the instruction of Dr. Johannes Wallmann in the Mead Witter School of Music. He enjoys collaborating with other local musicians, as well as composing new contemporary works in jazz for small and large ensembles

Joachim Austin is a music composer, educator, and pianist living in Madison, Wisconsin. He earned his master’s degree and DMA in composition at UW-Madison working with Dr. Laura Schwendinger, and he holds a bachelor’s degree in music composition from Brigham Young University. Joachim has been teaching music in both private and group lessons in Madison since 2019; his appointments include teaching theory to elementary and middle school students for the Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestra Music Makers program, leading a music internship course for high school seniors in the UW-Madison PEOPLE Program, and lecturing advanced music theory at the UW-Madison Mead Witter School of Music. His recent compositions have been featured in public concerts in Madison, Vienna, and Brasília, and his academic career includes years of study in Spanish and Arabic.