Pianist Jeanne Golan specializes in innovative programs that mix traditional and contemporary repertory. She has performed and recorded music of composers persecuted and killed in the Holocaust.

Golan was born on July 12, 1959, and grew up in Natick, Massachusetts. Her mother, Irene Soble Golan, was a music teacher and choir director at the local Temple Israel who programmed works by Jewish composers of the Renaissance. Golan attended Yale University, graduating in 1981. She went on for master's and doctoral degrees at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. Golan has been equally active around the U.S. as a concerto soloist, recitalist, chamber musician, and vocal accompanist. In the latter capacity, she has worked with mezzo-soprano Mary Nessinger on a "Cycles & Sequels" recital concept that commissions new works inspired by classic repertory. Golan has appeared with the American Symphony Chamber Orchestra, the Greenwich Symphony Orchestra, and the Hunter Symphony Orchestra at Hunter College in New York. She has performed with the Lark and Cavani Quartets as well as the Philip Glass Ensemble and other contemporary groups, including the Friends Enemies of New Music. Her solo recitals include those at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center in New York, Harvard and Yale Universities, as well as concert series in the U.S. and Europe. Golan has performed the complete piano sonatas of composer Viktor Ullmann, who was murdered in the Holocaust; she performed a program devoted to Ullmann at the Ravinia Festival in the Chicago region.

Golan made several albums of mostly contemporary music for the Albany label, beginning with Time Tracks in 1996. She was signed to the Steinway Sons label and released a cycle of Ullmann's sonatas in 2012. Golan has issued two more albums on Steinway Sons; she was heard on a collection of chamber music by Mieczyslaw Weinberg in 2018, and she released It Takes One to Tango, a collection of tango-inspired works that included composers affected by Nazi persecution, in 2020. Golan is a professor of music at the State University of New York at Nassau. ~ James Manheim, Rovi