Steve Malski Niles is a pianist, vocalist, multimedia artist, writer, and educator currently living in New Jersey, U. S. A.
Steve began his musical career at the very early age of five years old with accordion and piano lessons, and had his first professional job at the age of twelve. The home of Steve’s upbringing was constantly filled with music, as his father and sister also played, and all listened to music constantly. He later went on to receive a Bachelor of Fine arts in Jazz Piano and Voice, graduating Summa Cum Laude from Long Island University.
It was also during these early years that Steve was introduced to literature, first through children’s novels, and then through the works of Edgar Allen Poe, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and countless other authors. The love of literature stayed with Steve, and grew into a love of film and theater.
Steve particularly loved the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Francois Truffaut, Ken Loach and countless others, and the plays of Shakespeare.
While a student at Columbia College in New York City, Steve was introduced to the visual arts in the many courses that were offered by Columbia, which brought him into the famous museums of New York City, and ultimately, in a continued search of his own, to the great museums and galleries of the
world. Steve became particularly enamored of the work of Mark Rothko, Frank Stella, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol, Frida Kahlo, Yoko Ono and countless others.
Steve played music internationally, primarily in the jazz, rhythm and blues, gospal, and classical genres. Upon returning home to New Jersey to care for aging parents, Steve continued work on two major projects which he had been developing for some years. The first, a fictional multimedia project entitled “The Director” is based on the subject of mental health and emotional and spiritual healing. While earning a Master of Fine Arts in performance, Steve developed the skills enabling him to produce all aspects of the project including writing, video photography and editing, sound design, video and audio effects, set design and building, acting and of course the incorporation of music into the production. An archival film of the seventeen minute project was entered in to the Golden Door Film Festival in 2016, and was nominated for best music video. https://vimeo.com/user1571556/thedirector
The second major project for Steve was writing a book, which is about to be published in both English and Chinese, entitled “The Power of Art in Healing and Transformation.” It deals with the relationship of art to healing in mental and physical disease. Both this project, and “The Director” arose in large part as a result of Steve experiencing the ravages of mental illness in a close family member and friends.
Steve has various musical projects underway as organist, pianist and vocalist, as well as a number of books in development. One is a World War Two historical fiction based upon the members of his family and their participation in and relationship to the machinations of the war. Two others include the enlarging of the “Power of Art” into a series including “The Power of Art in Education and Learning”, and the second being ”The Power of Art in Politics and Diplomacy.”