Smt. Nandhini Venkatraman was born to the illustrious S.Shankaran Iyer (“GHANA KALA BHUSHANA” SRI KUMBAKKONAM BROTHERS ) who is a carnatic vocalist and a B’High grade artist of AIR. Her grandfather is Sri Sri Kothavasal Venkatrama Iyer (Varnam composer). Initially she trained under her father S. Shankaran Iyer and later she started her tutelage under “SANGEETHA SEVA NIRATHA '' Sri Kumbakonam S.Viswanatha Iyer. She has been a very active music practitioner since the age of 5. She has won numerous awards and prizes at her earlier stages. Alongwith training and practicing carnatic music with her guru she also continued her education and successfully completed her Bachelors in Sanskrit from Queen Mary’s College and further pursued Masters in Music from University of Madras. Later she took up teaching vocals along with her performing at concerts as her primary option. Nandhini has been running a music school for the past 35 years at Mylapore and 1000's of students have learnt and are learning from her. She has done her specializations on ragam, kalpana swaram and currently working on voice culture practices and teaching gamaks on keyboard. She is also the recipient of "The Best Teacher" award from Annamacharya Project of TTD. She also has a great passion towards cultivating music among kids and youngsters, hence she started teaching at schools. Her first school experience was with Vidhya Mandir at Mylapore. She taught there from 2000-2015 for 15 years. Later she started teaching at many other institutions. She has performed in almost all prestigious venues both in Chennai and other states. Apart from Carnatic music performances, she is also into Sangeetha Upanyasam series with upanyasam artists, workshops and demonstrations, singing for dance performances, music design for theatre shows, composing music for lyrics and many music oriented activities. She has also rendered shows for DD-Podhigai, Raj TV and many other television channels.
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