Pianist Victor Paukstelis (Viktoras Paukštelis in Lithuanian) was born in 1983 in Vilnius, Lithuania, into a family comprising of three generations of classical musicians. He began studying piano at the age of five, under private instruction of his mother Tatyana Radovich and grandmother Mariam Azizbekova (1919–2012), a student of Samuil Feinberg and long-standing professor at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, where her students had included some of the finest Lithuanian pianists and piano teachers, not excluding her daughter and grandchild (his bachelor’s degree obtained in 2005). Since 2001 Paukstelis has also been privately tutored by Nora Ray. After having obtained a master’s and a licentiate of arts degrees under Prof. Veronika Vitaitė at the academy in Vilnius (2005–9) and one semester spent at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Hamburg with Prof. Evgeny Koroliov (2006), he was granted the Albert Roussel Scholarship for advanced studies at the École Normale de Musique de Paris Alfred Cortot with Jean-Marc Luisada (2009–13). It was soon followed by the scholarship from the Cité Internationale des Arts, which led to four-year residency at the Cité and debut appearances at various venues in Paris. Additionally, he continued to hone his piano technique in master classes and gave performances at the Verbier Festival and Academy in Switzerland (led by Gary Graffman and Boris Petrushansky), the West Chester University Festival in Pennsylvania, U.S. (led by Anthony di Bonaventura), the International Holland Music Sessions in the Netherlands (led by Mikhail Voskresensky), the Festival in the Pite River Valley in Sweden (led by Jiří Hlinka) and elsewhere.