Her father and brother homesteaded briefly in Rumsey, Alberta, before the rest of the family joined them in Calgary in August 1911.
[1] In 1932 Bella enrolled in a four-year course at the Institute of Musical Art, the predecessor to the Juilliard School, in New York City.
[4] She studied under Egon Petri, Ernest Hutcheson, Nadia Reisenberg, and Alfred Mirovitch at the Juilliard Graduate School.
[6][7] She studied music education under Rosalyn Tureck and earned her teaching certificate at Columbia University Teachers College.
[8] On January 25, 1959, she performed on a WNYC radio program titled Keyboard Masters, and on April 22 of that year she appeared on WPIX-TV demonstrating "The Teaching of Theme and Variation Form".