Angela Kraft Cross

Angela Kraft Cross (b. 1958) is an organist, pianist and composer based in the Bay Area of California. She graduated from Oberlin College and Conservatory of Music in 1980 with bachelor’s degrees in Physics and Organ Performance. She then earned her Doctor of Medicine degree at Loma Linda University, where she subsequently completed her residency in ophthalmology. In 1993, she completed her Master of Music degree in Piano Performance at the College of Notre Dame with Thomas LaRatta. Her organ teachers have included Louis Robilliard, Marie-Louise Langlais, Sandra Soderlund, S. Leslie Grow, William Porter, and Garth Peacock. She has studied composition with Pamela Decker.

Kraft Cross has performed extensively on both organ and piano, having given over five hundred concerts across the United States, in Canada, England, Holland, France, Hungary, Korea, Lesotho and Guam, including such venues as Notre Dame Cathedral, St. Sulpice and the Madeleine in Paris, Washington National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., St. Patrick’s Cathedral and St. Thomas Church in New York City, Methuen Memorial Music Hall and Trinity Church in Boston, E. Power Biggs’s organ at Harvard, and Westminster Abbey, St. Paul’s Cathedral, and Southwark Cathedral in London.

Kraft Cross has released eight solo CD albums, recorded locally in California as well as in Paris, Lyon, and London. Three of her organ albums have received critical acclaim in The American Organist magazine. She has served as the organist of the Congregational Church of San Mateo since 1993 and is currently the Artist in Residence. She is also a regular organ recitalist at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco.

In addition to her musical career, Kraft Cross retired in 2011 having worked for 22 years as an ophthalmic surgeon at the Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Redwood City and now volunteers as an ophthalmologist at Samaritan House in Redwood City. She is committed to the musical education of young people and since 1997 has been instrumental in organizing an annual Organ Camp for young pianists headquartered at her church. Kraft Cross is the founding director of the San Francisco Peninsula Organ Academy, a nonprofit organization formed in 2014 to support young concert organists with scholarships on short intensive overseas study trips.