William Cunningham is a pianist, composer, and improviser based in Banff and Calgary, Alberta. Performing publicly since the age of seven, he has appeared for audiences including a State Dinner at the 2025 G7 Summit, members of the royal families of Britain and the Netherlands, the Trilateral Commission, and the Spruce Meadows Internationalists' Round Table.

Improvisation is at the centre of his work. Whether reinterpreting familiar repertoire or composing at the keyboard in real time, Cunningham plays to the room: the instrument, the acoustics, and the people in it shape what he plays as much as any score.

His career is closely tied to the Canadian Rockies, where he has held pianist-in-residence positions at the Fairmont Banff Springs and the Post Hotel in Lake Louise, and a residency at The Dorian, Autograph Collection in Calgary. He performs regularly at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity and the Fairmont Palliser, and has toured across Canada and the United States and internationally in Europe, Asia, Australia, and the Caribbean. In 2025 he gave 170 public performances, his busiest year to date.

Cunningham has released four solo albums — William, Temperance, Conception, and Enchanted — recorded at CBC's Glenn Gould Studio in Toronto and at Banff Centre. His commissioned work includes music for Waterkeeper Alliance fundraising events with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., television productions in Canada and Australia, contemporary dance and theatre, and improvised music for meditation programs in Canada and Vietnam. Current projects include The Pictures of Dorian Gray, a long-form improvisation cycle built around musical character, and The Music of Owls, a collection of short pieces drawn from the natural world.

He is also a concert piano technician, having worked on instruments at Banff Centre and the Fairmont Banff Springs. His technical work — tuning and temperament, action regulation, hammer voicing, and tone development — grew directly out of his playing. He treats the two as one discipline: the regulation of an action, the voicing of a hammer, the stretch of a tuning, and the room the piano sits in all end up in the sound the audience hears, and he would rather understand every link in that chain than leave any of it to chance.

A Banff Centre alumnus, Cunningham has served as a speaker, facilitator, consultant, and board member for Opera Las Vegas, the John Perry Academy of Music, the Canadian Federation of Music Teachers' Associations, and the Music Teachers National Association. His talk The Science of Music, presented at Mensa conferences in North America and Australia, asks why particular sounds move us and what the impulse to make music says about us, drawing on acoustics, biology, history, and psychology.

Outside the concert hall, he is a committed advocate for music education and community music-making. He has founded and directed a community choir, mentored young musicians, led fundraising and development initiatives, and built programs bringing together young people and seniors. His conviction, rooted in a childhood where music was part of family and community life, is that music belongs in homes, schools, restaurants, places of worship, and public spaces — wherever people gather — and that its greatest value lies in what happens between people when they experience it together.