Dragos Andrei Cantea is a Romanian concert pianist and cultural entrepreneur. He is the founder of DAC Music Performance in Oslo, active since 2017, and Co-Founder and Artistic Director of Classix Festival since 2020.

In 2025, he joined The New School (Mannes College of Performing Arts) in New York as Honorary Professor, further consolidating his work in transatlantic cultural cooperation and dialogue.

As a performer, he maintains an active international career across Europe and North America. He has appeared as a soloist with major Romanian orchestras and UK ensembles, collaborating with conductors such as Pawel Kapuła, Ovidiu Bălan, Fergus MacAlpine, Theo Wolters, Stefan Geiger and Cristian Mandeal. At leading festivals, he has shared the stage with violinists Hyeyoon Park and Sini Simonen, as well as cellists Benedict Kloeckner and Wen-Sinn Yang.

In 2024, he published The Complete Piano Works of Leoš Janáček. Transcendence through Programmatism, and since 2023 he has served as Honorary Counsellor to the Romanian Ministry of Culture. His academic journey culminated at the Norwegian Academy of Music, where he studied with Håvard Gimse and Kathryn Stott, completing a thesis entitled Nationalism in Music – an Artistic-Diplomatic Tool for the Understanding of Shared Values.

He is a triple graduate of the George Enescu National University of Arts in Iași (Bachelor’s, Master’s and Doctorate), where he studied for 18 years, between 1999 and 2017, under the guidance of Ioana Stănescu. His doctoral research was supervised by VOCES Quartet cellist, maestro Dan Prelipcean.

He is the recipient of several international scholarships, including Roche Continents (2018), Act in Art (2019), and the Rising Leaders programme of the US Embassy in Norway. Since 2019, he has served as Guest Lecturer at the University of Applied Sciences in Vaasa (Finland).

As a cultural entrepreneur, he has coordinated and partnered in large-scale projects supported by Arts Council Norway, Creative Europe, EEA/Norway Grants, and private stakeholders such as Telenor, Nordea, and DNB Sparebankstiftelsen.

Today, Dragos Cantea continues to build cultural bridges between Romania, Norway and the wider world, equally dedicated to his work as a performer, researcher and cultural diplomat. His activity consistently explores the intersection of music, dialogue and humanist values.