Lesley Sisterhen McAllister

Dr. Lesley Sisterhen McAllister serves as professor of piano, division director of keyboard studies, and director of piano pedagogy in the School of Music at Baylor University. In addition, she directs the Piano Laboratory Program for children in the community. Since 2022, she has served as director of the new Health and Wellness Initiative in the School of Music. Her research interests include imagery, mind-body relaxation techniques for performance anxiety, and mental rehearsal for musicians.

Dr. McAllister holds degrees from the University of Houston (BM ’99), Florida State University (MM ’01), and the University of Oklahoma (DMA ’05). An active clinician, Dr. McAllister is the author of The Balanced Musician: Integrating Mind and Body for Peak Performance (2012) and Yoga in the Music Studio (2020). Published several times in American Music Teacher, she was twice awarded “Article of the Year” award, in 2010 and 2024, by the Music Teachers National Association. Her scholarly writing also has been published in Clavier Companion, Piano Magazine, Piano Pedagogy Forum, and the MTNA E-Journal. She has collaborated with the Baylor Mind-Body Medicine Research Laboratory to investigate music listening for chronic pain, and she was co-author of a study on the use of an app to prevent musician injuries which was published in Frontiers in Psychology. She won the faculty award for Research among Tenured Professors from Baylor in 2019, was a Baylor Teaching Fellow in 2023-24, and received the Centennial Professor Award in 2021. She also was honored with the Collegiate Teacher of the Year Award from the Texas Music Teachers Association in 2022.  She serves as Faculty in Residence at Collins Hall, where she lives with her husband Scott, a composition professor in the School of Music, and their two sons, Cooper (12) and Camden (6). They also have two older sons: Jonathan (BA ’24) and Andy (BS ’20). They are members of Seventh and James Baptist Church in Waco.