Sara Davis Buechner

Sara Davis Buechner (born 1959) is an American concert pianist and educator currently based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Buechner was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1959; she is a transgender woman, assigned male at birth.

She studied music with Veronika Wolf Cohen, Reynaldo Reyes, and Mieczyslaw Münz, before graduating high school at Friends School of Baltimore in 1976.

She attended the Juilliard School as a pupil of Czech pianist Rudolf Firkusny and later worked with both Byron Janis and Paul Badura-Skoda.

In her twenties, she won major prizes at the Queen Elisabeth of Belgium International Piano Competition (1983), the Leeds International Piano Competition (1984), the Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition (6th prize, bronze medal 1986), and the Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition (1984, gold medal).

Her 1984, debut at the 92nd Street Y in New York City received a glowing review in The New York Times, and she has had an active performance career since that time.

She has edited books and music scores for Dover Publications, where she was chief music editor from 2009 to 2012.

Buechner has given talks and written about her experience as a role model for the LGBTQ community.

She was also an honorary Professor of the University of Shanghai from 2013 to 2016.

Buechner wrote about her life experiences in a 2013 article in The New York Times.

Buechner has performed with different orchestras with an active repertoire of more than 100 concertos, and has given master classes on four continents.

Buechner is a Yamaha Artist, and has made many recordings for the Disklavier player system.

Buechner has been on the piano faculty at Temple University since 2016, and had previously served on the faculties of the University of British Columbia, the Manhattan School of Music and New York University.