Diane Chaplin is a world-class cellist and nurturing music educator who lives in Portland, Oregon. She appears often as a concerto soloist, recitalist and chamber music artist, and tours around the US as a featured member of the Portland Cello Project. For the 2024-25 season she is the Cello Professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara; she also has a large class of private cello students, both in-person and on zoom, and teaches students all over the world through the Cello Refinery. Since the spring of 2020, Diane has been performing monthly livestream concerts of solo cello music, and has learned more than 250 pieces of solo repertoire during this timeDiane moved from New York City to Portland, Oregon, in 2009. Before taking up residence on the west coast, she spent 21 years as the cellist of the Colorado Quartet and with them had an international career which took her around the globe. The Quartet was the first all-female string quartet to perform the complete Beethoven Quartet cycle in both North America and Europe and their recordings of these works can be heard on the Parnassus label. Other award-winning discs are available on the Parnassus, Mode and Albany labels. Diane has held teaching positions at many prestigious institutions of higher learning, including Oberlin College-Conservatory and Swarthmore College, and taught for several years at Bard College in NY State. More recently she taught at both Linfield University and Lewis and Clark College in Oregon. She has given master classes at the Eastman School of Music, Northwestern University, Indiana University, Cleveland Institute of Music, Cincinnati Conservatory, Stanford University and the Banff Centre. As a member of the Colorado Quartet, she was visiting chamber music faculty at Yale University in 2009.Diane is an inspiring teacher of students young and old, and trained hundreds of cellists during a two-decade tenure at the Allen-Stevenson School in Manhattan. She often gives master classes and chamber music coachings, and adjudicates for solo, ensemble and orchestra festivals throughout Oregon and Washington. Diane holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the California Institute of the Arts, where she was a student of Cesare Pascarella, and a Master of Music degree from The Juilliard School, where she studied with Harvey Shapiro. She received a Special Prize from the International Cello Competition in Viña del Mar, Chile, and a Certificate from the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, and has appeared in solo concerts throughout the United States and Europe. She has performed several times with Mikhail Baryshnikov, and in cameo performances with the Flying Karamazov Brothers.  

Diane is an espresso snob and always tours with a hand-pump portable espresso device.

When not performing or teaching in the US, she escapes to teach and perform from her home in Siena, Italy (where she does not need the portable espresso maker).