Robin D. Stanton

Robin D. Stanton was born and brought up in Indonesia, an archipelagic country between the Indian and Pacific Oceans. He has roots in the Tibetan, Bhutanese, German, and Irish ethnicities. He was also told that his maternal grandmother was of Jewish descent even though his family was not observant and never explored his Jewish ancestry. Robin was privately educated at a Catholic school as a child although he was never baptized a Catholic. He subsequently moved to Germany and lived there for a few years; the school he went to in North Rhine-Westphalia is ironically located in close proximity to the Cologne Cathedral, which houses The Shrine of the Three Kings. Having earned his German "Hochschulzugangsberechtigung," Robin initially expected to attend college in Europe. His family, however, ended up settling in City of Angels in Southern California.

Growing up, Robin had delayed speech and was a slow reader. Developing an unnecessary inferiority complex, he became used to being shunned by his peers and having few friends. He did not gain confidence in his reading skills until he encountered at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) a Princeton scholar by the name of Professor Kirstie McClure, who convinced him that critical and deep reading would be a useful practice in graduate-level studies. While his passion for art started at an early age, Robin did not begin to explore his artistic side until later on. He became passionate about performing arts when he met a young Doctor of Musical Arts at the University of Southern California (USC) who would start tutoring him in classical piano in 2018. Encouraged by his expert tutor two years later, Robin participated in the prestigious World Bach Competition at the Boulder Bach Festival in 2020 and took third place at the event. He also crossed paths with a couple of graduates of The Juilliard School who highly commended his artistic talent around this time.