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Despite her solo artist status, Eleni P. Sekas-Dadian ’26 — professionally known as Eleni Paris — is proof that great art requires a village of people and life experiences in order to be made. Born to two parents with a love for classic rock but no musical ability to speak of, her musical journey began at the age of five at a Montessori school in California, where she learned to play piano through some unorthodox teaching practices.

“We had no homework, and my only homework was playing music and playing piano. I had this terrifying Hungarian teacher that would put a metal roller in my back so that I would stay straight because it was so cold. And I loved it,” Dadian said in an interview with The Crimson.

Her parents only required her to play for a year but she continued on, playing in spite of scary teachers and metal rods. Thanks to lessons provided by her school, she eventually picked up the guitar as a second instrument at the age of nine. Once again, she met all adversity head on — this time in the form of a simple misunderstanding and some literal growing pains.

“At the time I was just doing classical guitar and my dad didn’t know the difference between a classical guitar and a regular acoustic, so he bought me an acoustic guitar. So out of all the other students that had classical guitars with nylon strings, I had steel strings and I was playing with this baby Taylor and I developed probably the most intense calluses for any girl ever because of it,” she said.

It is around this time that the seeds which would one day blossom into her work started to be planted. Around the age of 10, Dadian began writing music and attended a music camp where she met her longtime guitar teacher, Kat, who introduced her to the world of folk music through artists like Nick Drake, Simon & Garfunkel, and Adrianne Lenker.

After graduating middle school, Dadian moved to New York City for high school, and it was through her guitar teacher that she was introduced to a grad student named Jacob who was studying film composition at NYU. Jacob helped her learn to write string arrangements and began working with her as a producer on her songs. However, Jacob wouldn’t always be available to help her in production; once the pandemic hit in 2020, Dadian was forced to start producing on her own and draw from her own experiences, unlocking a new thread to her music.

“I wasn’t there with him in person and he wasn’t helping me produce, so I kind of had to figure out how to do it on my own. Because I come from a choir background, that was kind of my entry point into production. I was like ‘Oh my God, I can think of all these harmonies’ and because string instruments are really similar to the human voice I was able to apply a lot of the same logic to what I knew about choir arrangements to string arrangements,” she said.

Eventually, once everything settled and she was getting ready to head off to college, she got in the studio and was able to record her first singles — “Room For One,” “Stuck In The Amber,” and “Bleeding Cards” — songs which acted as a sonic representation of her life up to the point where they were recorded. The piano intro in “Room For One,” soft guitar on “Stuck In The Amber,” and the layered harmonies in all three were born out of the experiences and people in her life which have now manifested themselves in her music.

Since coming to Harvard, Dadian has continued to evolve as an artist and work with the people around her. In late 2024 she dropped her first EP, “Back o’ the Beyond,” with the help of some musicians she had met as a part-time student at Berklee College of Music. She also coordinated a show at legendary folk venue Club Passim with three other Harvard students. She was even able to leverage her schoolwork into a creative output, turning her Humanities 10 final project into a song called “Cry With Me,” which was released as part of her EP. This isn’t the first time she’s used literature as a source for inspiration either.

“I am very grateful that there is an inherent dynamism inside of me that is open to absorbing as many influences around me, whether it’s music or whether it’s actually literature. Like my song ‘Madame’ that I wrote in 2022 and released then, that’s based off of the book ‘Madame Bovary,’” she said.

Unfortunately, fans will have to wait a bit for more music from Dadian, as she’s currently elbow deep in thesis writing and doesn’t want to rush her process. She says a summer internship revealed to her that the music industry often expects artists to pump out work at a rapid pace, leading to sub-par work — something that she doesn’t want to fall victim to. Regardless of when and what she decides to make, rest assured that it will be a reflection of herself and the people that helped get her there.