Chanler Bailey
Chanler Bailey has been involved in the percussive arts in one form or another - private lessons, Drum & Bugle Corps, collegiate drumline instructor - since a very young age. While a Percussion Performance major at West Virginia University, Chanler began playing steel drums as part of WVU's World Music Program, under the direction of Dr. Phil Faini. He was a member of WVU's Percussion '90 Ensemble that traveled across West Virginia to share World Music. In 1992, as part of this World Music Center initiative, steel drum pioneer, Dr. Ellie Mannette came to WVU and formed the University Tuning Project to pass on the steel drum art form. Chanler began his apprenticeship as a steel drum craftsman, tuner, and clinician at that time. Chanler created cbStudios in 2007 to reconnect with teaching and performing. His classes meet weekly and perform at fundraisers and festivals throughout West Virginia. He began teaching steel band at West Virginia University in 2021. Additionally, Chanler builds, tunes, and makes accessories for the steel drum. For over 20 years, he has been a craftsman for Mannette Instruments, guided by the late Dr. Mannette, and travels as a tuner and clinician.
Katelyn Best
Katelyn Best is a Teaching Assistant Professor of Musicology at West Virginia University. A musicologist and vocalist by training, she earned her B.M. in vocal performance from Saint Mary’s College followed by her M.M. and Ph.D. in musicology from Florida State University. She served as a lecturer for the Department of Musicology at Florida State University as well as the Department of Anthropology and African Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University. She was also Co-Director of the Florida State University’s Andean Ensemble and Director of the World Music Ensemble Summer Music Program.As a scholar, her research explores music in Deaf culture, hip hop, sound studies, musical movements, and cultural activism. She received a Carol Krebs Research Fellow Award to conduct fieldwork throughout the U.S. and was awarded the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) Crossroads Music and Social Justice Paper Prize and the SEM Applied Ethnomusicology Paper/Project Prize for work based on this research. She has presented this work both nationally and internationally and has published articles within Lied und Populäre Kultur and the Journal of American Sign Languages and Literatures, a peer-reviewed digital journal with publications in American Sign Language. Recent publications include “Expanding Musical Inclusivity: Representing and Re-presenting Music and Deaf Culture through Deaf Hip Hop Performance” in Participatory Approaches to Music and Democracy and “Ethnocentrism 2.0: The Impact of Hearing-Centrism on Musical Expression in Deaf Culture” in At the Crossroads: Music and Social Justice. She was also a founding committee member and former chair for the SEM Disability and Deaf Studies Special Interest Group. She currently serves as Co-Director and Publicist for the Society for Ethnomusicology Orchestra and is co-editor of At the Crossroads: Music and Social Justice (Indiana University Press).
Patricia Shehan Campbell
Patricia Shehan Campbell is Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington, working at the interface of education and ethnomusicology. Her expertise is in children’s musical cultures and World Music Pedagogy, with multiple publications that include Songs in Their Heads; Music in Childhood; the Oxford Handbook on Children’s Musical Cultures; Music, Education and Diversity, Teaching Music Globally; Oxford’s 28-volume Global Music Series; and the Routledge World Music Pedagogy Series. Campbell is recipient of the 2012 Taiji Award, the 2017 Koizumi Prize for work on the preservation of traditional music through educational practice, and an Honorary Membership in the Society for Ethnomusicology since 2021. She is educational consultant to Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, the Alan Lomax recordings, and the Global Jukebox.
Heidi Dunkle
Heidi Dunkle is a teacher in Monongalia County Schools in Morgantown WV. She currently teaches K-5 general music at Skyview Elementary and serves as the County’s General Music Facilitator. She is a member of the Mountain Laurel Chapter of AOSA, #118. She has certification in Orff-Schulwerk and a certificate from Smithsonian Folkways for World Music Pedagogy. She is on the WVMEA Advocacy Leadership Force and the West Virginia Public Theatre Board of Trustees. Heidi collaborates with WVU School of Music as host for the General Music Lab School Experience for undergraduate music education majors. She received awards as Music Educator of the Year for the County, Region, and State (2004-2006) and enjoys presenting music education workshops at the state and national levels.
Chris Haddox
Chris Haddox is a Logan, West Virginia born and raised songwriter/singer/multi-instrumentalist who is now based in Morgantown, West Virginia. Chris writes and sings songs about (to quote him) “religion, firearms, courthouse squares, goats on trampolines, shoes, fiddles, and hurricanes”—whatever catches his eye. He deftly combines humor, sarcasm, and blunt honesty to create songs that are accessible and relatable to a wide variety of audiences. Chris is also a community leader who has directed Habitat for Humanity and worked to preserve old neighborhoods, a WVU professor of sustainable design, and an amateur musicologist who researches musicians from the southern coalfields of West Virginia. https://omekas.lib.wvu.edu/home/s/folkmusic/page/About The music community knows Chris as a well-loved, easy-going consummate picker who never met a stringed instrument he couldn’t master—not to mention a gifted songwriter in the traditional country/Americana vein. An exceptional musician with an open heart, Chris is a collection of all the right kinds of contrasts. In short, Chris Haddox represents everything that is good about Appalachia. https://www.chrishaddoxmusic.com/
Ginny Hawker
Ginny Hawker was born to sing growing up in rural Virginia in a large musical family. Starting with the unaccompanied unison singing of her father’s church that came to this country from Scotland where lyrics are so important, she learned to connect with groups of singers deep into their shared experiences. Ginny learned harmony Bluegrass and southern gospel singing with her Dad and her cousins. The blend of voices singing together pulled her ear. Getting her degree later in life in Early Childhood Education was a natural pathway into 30 years of passing on what she had learned at the knee of her family to children and adults who did not grow up in this rich traditional culture. Ginny has taught weeklong singing classes at The Augusta Heritage Center in Elkins,(WV), Ashokan Southern Week (NY), Pacific Coast Music Week (CA), Centrum Fiddle Tunes, (WA), Puget Sound Guitar Week (WA), Swannanoa (NC), and Sore Fingers Music Camp (England). As well, she has taught many 1-hour singing workshops at festivals all over the US and Canada. What has turned out to be the most rewarding teaching experience for Ginny and her students has been 12 years of “Homeshops” where she invited 2 people (age 12 and up), to stay in her home for 3 days, share meals cooked together, go for walks during study breaks, and work intensely on singing the way she learned - “knee to knee” 6-7 hours a day. Ginny has recorded 4 cds with her husband, Tracy Schwarz, 4 with Kay Justice, and 2 solo cds. In 2024, Ginny Hawker received the Vandalia Award from the WV Department of Arts, Culture and History, which she humbly accepted. In acknowledging the award, Augusta Center Canter writes, “Ginny’s singing pulls the listener into a vortex when the past is suddenly palpable and the present moment feels eternal…she has worked tirelessly to pass on the music and to shine the spotlight on other traditional artists.”
Mary Linscheid
Mary Linscheid is from Harmony Grove, WV, abd holds a B.A. in English Creative Writing with minors in Appalachian Music and Appalachian Studies from West Virginia University. In her poetry, prose, and music, she explores the connection Appalachians have to their homeland, traditions, and community. She performs with alt-folk band The Wild Shoats, which won 1st place in the Appalachian String Band’s Neo-Traditional Band Contest in 2023, and her poetry and academic writing has been published in the likes of Goldenseal, Journal of Appalachian Studies, and the Anthology of Appalachian Writers: Ann Pancake, vol. XVI. Currently, Mary is the Appalachian Programs Coordinator at Arthurdale Heritage in Preston County, WV.
Jennifer Mellizo
Jennifer Mellizo is the Education Specialist at Smithsonian Folkways Recordings (SFR) in Washington, DC, where she writes interdisciplinary educational materials that utilize audio tracks from the SFR collection and primary resources from across the Smithsonian Institution. Prior to this position, she was a successful K–8 general music, band, and choir teacher at the University of Wyoming Laboratory School in Laramie for 22 years. Jennifer was a Wyoming Arch Coal Teacher of the Year in 2014, the Albany County School District #1 Teacher of the Year in 2016, and a U.S. Fulbright Scholar to Spain in 2021. She is a member of the Journal of General Music Education editorial board, publishes research and practical articles in a variety of peer-reviewed journals, and frequently presents her work at regional, national, and international conferences. Jennifer recently published a book entitled Re-Imagining Curricula in Global Times: A Music Education Perspective.
Val Mindel
Val Mindel is a longtime musician, teacher and workshop leader, known for helping singers achieve that close, buzzy harmony that is a pillar of old-time and early-country harmony as found in Appalachia. She is a veteran staff member at the Augusta Heritage Center in Elkins, West Virginia, and in addition has taught at numerous music camps across the U.S., including: the Ashokan Center (Southern Week and the Old-Time Rollick), Centrum (Voice Works and Fiddle Tunes) and Allegheny Echoes. Internationally, she's taught traditional singing in such diverse locations as the UK, Hong Kong, Japan and India. She is a founding member of the California-based Any Old Time string band (check out the band’s compilation album I Bid You Goodnight on Smithsonian Folkways), and has two CDs with daughter and West Virginia country musician Emily Miller (In the Valley and Close to Home). Val is also the author of So You Want to Sing Folk Music, part of the “So You Want to Sing” series for Rowman & Littlefield and the National Association of Teachers of Singing. She is also coauthor (with Dr. Kathy Bullock) of a chapter on traditional singing for the soon-to-be-published Oxford Handbook of Voice Pedagogy. When she is not immersed in the country music of Appalachia she plays fiddle and sings with the West Virginia-based Celtic band The Mud Larks. She lives in Elkins, West Virginia.
Janet Robbins
Janet Robbins is professor emerita of music education at West Virginia University. Her teaching and scholarship reflect a career-long interest in ethnographic research, practitioner inquiry, and Orff Schulwerk’s music and movement approach. Her book chapter “Practitioner Inquiry,” appears in The Oxford Handbook of Qualitative Research in American Music Education, Vol. 1 (Oxford online, 2023). For more than twenty years, Janet was part of Eastman’s summer Orff Schulwerk program, both as a teacher and as director of a teacher-research collaborative, Orff SPIEL (Schulwerk Project: Implementing Eastman’s Levels). Her interest in cross-cultural creativity was sparked by her work with Music Alive!, a federally funded faculty-student exchange project between WVU and Brazil partner universities in Recife and Rio de Janeiro (2006-2012). University students’ study-abroad experiences are chronicled in her chapter “Crossing Borders: Building Bridges for an International Exchange in Music Teacher Education,” published in Alternative Approaches in Music Education: Case Studies from the Field (2010). Janet traveled to Brazil to study music and dance traditions of Northeast Brazil for two sabbaticals (2006 and 2011), and in 2018 she returned to the Federal University of Pernambuco in Recife as a Fulbright Specialist for a project, “Music, Culture, and Creative Practices,” aimed at promoting the nexus of music education and ethnomusicology. She has served as coordinator for WVU’s Smithsonian Folkways Certificate Course in World Music Pedagogy since 2015.
Katie Schramm
Katie Schramm is a choral music educator and a first-year PhD student at the University of Michigan. Katie taught in Berkeley County, West Virginia, for ten years, serving in numerous roles on the WVMEA and WVACDA executive boards. While at WVU for her master's, Katie was the instructor of record for undergraduate choral methods and voice class for instrumental majors and supervised student teachers. Katie has presented her research on culturally sustaining pedagogies in the choral classroom and teacher agency at state and national conferences. In 2012, Katie traveled to Ghana for thirty days to study songs, drumming, and dance throughout the country. She plans to take a similar trip to Mysore, India, this July. Katie also regularly adjudicates, having served as a judge for choral competitions in Ohio, Virginia, West Virginia, and Indiana.
Michael B. Vercelli
Michael B. Vercelli is the director of the World Music Performance Center at West Virginia University. Michael holds a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Percussion Performance with a minor in Ethnomusicology from the University of Arizona. Michael’s research focuses on the transmission and performance practice of percussive traditions of Africa and African Diaspora. He has conducted long-term fieldwork on the xylophone traditions of Ghana and has studied in Brazil, Guinea, Uganda, Cuba, and Bali. Dr. Vercelli has received many awards for both his performance and study of indigenous music and has released recordings with master Ghanaian xylophonists Tijan Dorwana and Bernard Woma. Michael has received the Snowshoe Institute Award of Excellence for Scholarship in the Arts and the WVU College of Creative Arts awards for Outstanding Service and Internationalizing the College. At WVU, Dr. Vercelli directs summer study abroad courses to Ghana, Brazil, and Belize, focusing on music, dance and cultural immersion. Dr. Vercelli has published in the Percussive Arts Society’s journal, Percussive Notes, and in the third edition of Gary Cook’s Teaching Percussion. He is a participating member in the Percussive Arts Society, the Society for Ethnomusicology, and the International Council for Traditional Music. Michael has given lectures, performances, and workshops across the United States, Mexico, Brazil, China, and Europe. Dr. Vercelli is a Meinl Percussion Artist and a member of the Vic Firth Educational Team.
Juliana Cantarelli Vita
Juliana Cantarelli Vita is an activist, musician, ethnomusicologist, and music educator based on the unceded ancestral lands of the Duwamish people, known as Seattle, Washington. Born and raised in Recife, Brazil, she has been an active part of the Smithsonian Folkways Certificate Course in World Music Pedagogy at West Virginia University, the University of Washington, and directed the course at University of Hartford’s Hartt School. Blending her interests in music education and ethnomusicology, she has published on children's community of music practice within AfroBrazilian drumming traditions, community music-making, feminist spaces for music-making, family-music making, and collective songwriting with Indigenous Yakama youth. Juliana has been invited to share her work at many conferences, professional development workshops, and for university residences in the U.S., Brazil, and Portugal. Her voice and work can also be found in streaming platforms as the co-host and co-producer of the podcast Massa: Brazilian Music and Culture. At the core of her work with nonprofit organizations is her involvement with the Seattle-based organizations Rain City Rock Camp and Honk!Fest West since 2018 as performer, volunteer, and coordinator. As an active musician, she is the co-founder and director of Maracatu Baque Maré and performs regularly with her bands Som da Massa and Cria. When not making music, teaching, or writing, Juliana enjoys spending time in the beautiful Pacific Northwest wild, paddle boarding, biking, hiking, and snowboarding.