My journey as a performer and teacher has been shaped by my experiences as a student who suffered injury while I was an undergraduate student in college. Many years of corrective study with Anne-Marguerite Michaud, Kathleen Bride,  and other prominent students of the late Marcel Grandjany helped me to not only relieve my tendinitis, but to delve deeply into a technique which creates a warm and beautiful sound while maintaining relaxed and injury-free playing. It is always my goal to give my students a solid basis in this technique which frees them to be able to play any genre and style of music on the harp with a beautiful sound and infinite palette of tonal color. Many of my students have gone on to study at the pre-college programs of Juilliard, Manhattan School of Music, and Mannes, and on the college and graduate level at Eastman, MSM, Yale, Princeton, and the Royal College of Music in London. I have also been on the faculty of the Brevard Music Center and the Hartwick Summer Music Festival in Oneonta, NY where I taught students from high school to graduate level.  

In 2018, I completed my Doctor of Musical Arts degree at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University where much of my focus was on pedagogy and the subject of my dissertation was “Marcel Grandjany’s Pedagogical Compositions and Transcriptions.” Grandjany was the harp teacher at Juilliard from 1938 to 1975 and was a virtuoso performer and composer who taught many of the greatest harpists of the 20^th century. His compositions and transcriptions are staples of the student and professional repertoire and make up a large part of my own recitals and concerts.

Study of historic harps and performance practice has also impacted my teaching. The technique for playing the instruments of the past is a direct link to the modern harp. The method of pressing the strings (rather than plucking them) was necessary on the lighter tension strings of these instruments and continues to be the best way to produce beautiful sound on today's harp.