Pianist and vocal coach Caroline Dowdle was born in Cape Town and studied at the University of Cape Town before moving to the UK to study solo piano at the Royal Northern College of Music. After two years there as a Junior Fellow, she moved to London to pursue a career as a freelance artist and has been based there ever since. 

She has performed extensively in Britain and Europe, giving recitals with singers and instrumentalists at the Royal Opera House, the South Bank and Wigmore Hall in London, in Paris for Radio France, at Carnegie Hall, and in Madrid, Valencia, and Moscow. She has participated in numerous recitals with the renowned baritone Sir Thomas Allen and with Sir Simon Keenlyside.

 She regularly works as principal coach with singers on the Jette Parker Artists' Programme at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and is a member of the vocal faculty at the Royal College of Music in London. She has also been a guest coach on the Lindemann Programme at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, at the Estonian National Opera, and in Beijing.

 She is the director of the Opera Department at the Verbier Festival Atelier Lyrique, where she has performed frequently for the past fifteen years. She regularly collaborates with the Samling Institute as a leader in its masterclass weeks and, since 2014, has been the musical director of the Samling Academy, a masterclass program for young singers aged 13 to 18, based in Newcastle, England.

 In the last two years, she has also been a guest coach at the Internationale Meistersinger Akademie in Neumarkt, at TANZOS, a program for young artists in New Zealand, and at the Young Artists Studio of the Canadian Opera Company. In June 2026, she will join the Britten Pears Artist Programme as a leader.