What is your title at the College?
I’m the assistant professor of voice, I don’t know if I’m considered a visiting or guest professor, something like that.
Where are you from?
I currently live in Central Florida, I grew up in LA.
How long have you been teaching voice?
I’ve been doing this kind of work for probably about eight years. My background is in classical music and I branched out to do musicals along the way. I’ve been involved in musical productions as a performer my whole career, which is about four decades. But I’ve been a voice teacher for that whole time. I love the one-on-one work to help people free their voices for whatever they want to use them for. I went to grad school about eight years ago and during that time I really focused on rhetoric and learning more about public speaking and performing.
What did you major in in college and graduate school?
I went to Chapman College in Orange County, California, and my major was music. I have a bachelor’s in music in vocal performance and I have a master of fine arts, an MFA, in interdisciplinary arts and performance creation concentration.
What other schools did you work at before Prin?
Fairfield University, I did some workshops at Purdue University, Cal State Fullerton, Arizona State, so different opportunities to do master classes and perform guest artist work.
After graduating college did you immediately go into teaching?
I’ve always been a private teacher, so I’ve always helped students along the way, because I really like to help people break through a sense of limitation. And I’ve always had really wonderful teachers myself, whose technique was really grounded in metaphysics, so for me it was exciting to get to share those ideas that I’m passionate about. After college, I went out and started performing right away, so I moved to San Francisco when I was in the San Francisco opera chorus for a couple of years. Before, I was a singing waiter at a place called Max’s Opera Cafe, and that was a great job! I was having a great time with it and then I got into the opera chorus which was really a great opportunity and then I moved back to LA and started getting opportunities to perform solo work with the Los Angeles Opera and then performed at the Hollywood Bowl, did some concert work I sang as a soloist, I did some opera excerpts.
Then I met my husband, actually, and was deciding whether to stay in LA and keep that whole trajectory going or to move to Florida with him to where he lived and I decided to try and start my career over again in Florida, and we ended up starting a family. During the course of raising children I kept singing, some operatic performances and some concert work, and then I had the opportunity to be the soloist at the Mother Church, which went on for seven years. We moved to Connecticut when my first two kids were young, and then we would commute to Boston and relocate for the weekend. During those seven years I had two more children, it was so exciting and they loved going to Sunday School, but after those 7 years, having the fourth child, it was a lot! So I stepped away from that and it was about when my youngest kid was 15 I was like, alright I’m going to go back and get my masters degree to pursue the academic work that I love a little bit more.
What brought you to Prin?
Well, I’ve been cherishing the idea to work here for a very long time, because I really believe in the mission of this college and want to support that mission, and I know they’ve always had a great emphasis on music and theater which are my two passion, so I’ve kind of dreamed of having an opportunity to work with both departments, and this semester it just so happened that since they’re doing the musical, they’ve been looking to have somebody support the vocal work in that musical, and I’ve been talking with faculty for a while about possible opportunities so this idea came that they were doing a musical and I could come to support and it just happened at the same time that the music department had a need for a voice teacher.
What are you looking forward to for this year?
Wow, well, just continuing to see the students blossom, all of them week to week make wonderful progress, I’m excited to see where all of them continue to blossom and to see the production come together, both the musical and the Messiah with the orchestra and choir. I love seeing the process of something developing and, of course, the finished product. But the process is just as important and just as exciting.
