Ekaterina Murina is a Soviet and Russian pianist and music teacher, born on November 28, 1938, in Leningrad. She became a People's Artist of the Russian Federation in 2000 and has served as professor and head of the special piano department at the St. Petersburg Conservatory.
She was born into an educated Leningrad family. Her father, Alexei Murin, worked as an engineer at a research institute, and her mother, Elizaveta Kudryavtseva-Murina, was a choral conductor who worked for many years at the Capella. During the war years, Murina spent her time in evacuation with her mother and brother Alexander, while her father remained in besieged Leningrad.
After the war she studied at the ten-year music school with R. I. Savshinskaya and L. M. Pevzner. She then graduated from the Rimsky-Korsakov Leningrad State Conservatory in 1961 and completed postgraduate study there in 1964 in the class of Professor P. A. Serebryakov. Other important mentors were A. M. Shtrimer in chamber ensemble and E. M. Shenderovich in accompaniment.
Murina's repertoire included large-scale works and miniatures by Russian composers such as Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Taneyev, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich, as well as Western European composers including Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt, Schumann, Brahms, and Debussy. She did much to promote the music of Leningrad composers, among them Leonid Balay, Gennady Belov, Vladimir Voloshin, Valery Gavrilin, Boris Goltz, Orest Yevlakhov, Andrei Mnatsakanyan, Evgeny Ovchinnikov, Sergei Slonimsky, Boris Tishchenko, Vladislav Uspensky, and Yuri Falik, and was often the first performer of their works.
She gave hundreds of concerts across the Soviet Union and toured repeatedly in Germany, France, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Korea, Finland, and China. She appeared both as a soloist and with orchestras conducted by V. Altshuler, A. Anikhanov, A. Boreyko, E. Gustin, A. Dmitriev, V. Ziva, D. Kitayenko, K. Kondrashin, F. Mansurov, R. Martynov, V. Nesterov, A. Paulavichyus, G. Rozhdestvensky, E. Serov, V. Chernushenko, A. Jansons, and M. Jansons.
Her teaching career at the conservatory developed from assistant to her own teacher to professor. During her teacher's concert tours, she worked with students from his class and with pupils of the people's conservatory. As of 2026, she heads the special piano department at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, where her entire pedagogical career has been based. She also gives master classes in Russia, Finland, Korea, and England.
Murina has also been active as an organizer in piano competition life. She has served as chair and jury member of a number of Russian and international piano competitions, organized and permanently chaired the P. A. Serebryakov Piano Competition, wrote the book about Serebryakov titled Memories of a Teacher, and was secretary of the St. Petersburg Union of Concert Figures.
Among her distinctions are the honorary title People's Artist of Russia in 2000, a prize at an international competition in the United Kingdom in 1963, second prize at the All-Union Competition in 1961, and a bronze medal at the 7th World Festival of Youth and Students in Vienna in 1959.