Patricia Santos

Bedford Hills Program Director, Cello/Songwriting

Patricia Santos is a singing cellist (or vocellist) and songwriter of varied musical styles. She draws on her classical training to meld the cello with non-classical styles and explorative techniques. Her music inhabits blues, rock, folk pop, and sometimes avant-cabaret. Lucid Culture called her a "dark, diverse cello rocker", and Vance Gilbert describes her “as if Nina Simone and Yo-Yo Ma had a kid.” Her debut EP "Never Like You Think" was listed on New York Music Daily's Top 50 NYC Albums of 2015. Patricia’s show in the inaugural Newburgh Fringe Festival explored immigrant experiences, intergenerational trauma, and fighting censorship and oppression through a set of original songs. Since 2018, she has been part of the Bushwick Book Club, an artist collective created by Susan Hwang; a curated group is assigned a piece of literature, creates new art in response, and presents the outcome at a public performance, all usually within a few weeks. As a songwriter for the BBC, she was an artist in residence at the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library in Indianapolis in the fall of 2022; working with four other songwriters, an album’s worth of new songs were created as a part of Banned Books Week, an international anti-censorship project. Patricia is half of Petty Larceny with her multi-instrumentalist husband Brian Broelmann, half of the duo of singing cellists The Whiskey Girls with Tara Hanish, and is a member of parlor rock big band Kotorino led by Jeff Morris.

She has played in storied venues around the country including Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Joe's Pub, Bowery Ballroom, Music Hall of Williamsburg, 54 Below, NPR's Tiny Desk, House of Blues, Beachland Ballroom, The Music Box Supper Club, and The Oriental Theater. She has worked with artists such as Hurray for the Riff Raff (“The Navigator”), Charming Disaster, Katreese Barnes, Martha Redbone, Valerie Simpson, The Orange Peels, Emily Mure, Tim Haufe, Adam Falcon, and Prince Ea. In addition to playing in many theatre pit orchestras, she had cast/instrumentalist roles in world premieres at Joe’s Pub and Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival.

Patricia is a teaching artist and program director for Musicambia, a non-profit that brings the transformational power of music to incarcerated communities. She is a guest clinician offering workshops on classical and alternative cello styles, small and large ensemble skills, composing, arranging, and songwriting. She serves on the Board of Directors of the New Directions Cello Association - an alternative-style cello festival, and previously served on the Board of Directors of the Violoncello Society of New York. She became a voting member of the Recording Academy in 2022. She received her Bachelor’s of Music in Cello Performance from Baldwin-Wallace Conservatory with Regina Mushabac, and her postgraduate studies were with Bryan Dumm of the Cleveland Orchestra. Patricia was born and raised in New York as a proud daughter of immigrants, and she and her husband currently reside in the Hudson Valley,  with some four-legged folks and dozens of instruments.