Having recently relocated to Toronto from Vancouver, Christopher Foley is a pianist dedicated to the fields of teaching, chamber music, art song, opera, and contemporary music.  At the Eastman School of Music, he received a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in 1994, majoring in Piano Accompanying and Chamber Music as a student of Jean Barr and David Burge.  He is currently on the Faculty of the Royal Conservatory of Music, previously having served on the faculties of the Vancouver Academy of Music and the University of British Columbia.  This summer marked his tenth summer as Resident Accompanist at the Bowdoin Summer Music Festival.  In 1989 at the Eckhardt-Grammaté Competition for the Performance of Contemporary Music, he won first prize for the performance of the commissioned work (Walter Buczinski's Mosaics) and third prize overall.  In 1991, he won first prize in piano at the Kneisel Competition for the Performance of German Lieder in Rochester, New York.

Since moving to Toronto last August, he has served as repetiteur for Tapestry New Opera's production of Facing South by Linda C. Smith and Don Hannah, as well as for Tapestry’s librettist/director laboratories.  Recent premieres include John Sherlock’s Line Dance Variation for the Toronto Dance Theatre production Six at the Beginning, Jackie Shin’s Space for solo piano for the Canadian Contemporary Music Workshop, and Laura Schwendinger’s Pointillisms for solo piano at the April in Santa Cruz festival.  This spring, he performed works by Linda Catlin Smith, Andriy Talpash and Juhan Puhm with the Continuum Ensemble in Distillation:  The Water Project, an interdisciplinary project featuring video installations by Ramona Ramlochand.  A longtime member of the Vancouver New Music Ensemble, solo performances have included The Wanderer: Chamber Music of Africa and two critically acclaimed six-hour retrospectives of 20th-century music, entitled Countdown: The Odd Decades and Countdown: The Even Decades—Distance and Enchantment.  In March of 2002 he coached and performed in Modern Baroque Opera's production of Peter Hannan's controversial new opera 120 Songs for the Marquis de Sade.  He has also  premiered works at the Cleveland State Composers’ Forum, Vancouver International New Music Festival, Sonic Boom and the Gamper Festival of Contemporary Music.