Meet the Voice Works Faculty
Singing opens doors to other cultures and languages, and it makes you feel good! Come to Centrum to work beside world-class artists and passionate singers. Learn more about the Voice Works music program
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Christine Balfa
Christine Balfa is a native Louisiana French speaker, a committed and caring teacher, and a deeply- rooted Cajun musician with a passion for culture and education. As the daughter of Cajun cultural ambassador and National Heritage Fellow Dewey Balfa, she grew up in the center of the renaissance of Cajun and Creole culture. After his passing, she formed the musical group Balfa Toujours and created the non-profit Louisiana Folk Roots, of which she was the founding executive director.…
Dina Blade
Dina Blade is a singer with a deeply relaxed sense of time and swing. She spent her early childhood watching old cartoons with jazz soundtracks and has been enthralled with the music ever since. She has graced stages in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Cuba and Brazil, singing at festivals, jazz clubs, schools, parties and other community events.…
Gail Davies
Gail Davies is one of Nashville’s finest singers, songwriters, and record producers. A pioneering performer, she was the first female in country music to produce her own recordings and has been cited as a major influence by such diverse acts as Mary-Chapin Carpenter, Kathy Mattea, Suzy Bogguss, and Pam Tillis. A gifted, multi-faceted musician with country, bluegrass and blues leanings, Gail has delighted in spreading her creative wings since she scored with her revival of Webb Pierce’s No Love Have I in 1978.…
DaShawn and Wendy Hickman
Wendy and DaShawn Hickman are a married couple of sweetheart musicians, rooted in gospel roots and soulful tradition. They share a home in Mt. Airy, North Carolina.
DaShawn is one of today’s foremost players of Sacred Steel, a blues-gospel tradition started in the Pentecostal-Holiness churches of the 1930s. He grew up hearing the pedal steel in the tiny House of God church his family attended in Mt.…
Laurie Lewis
with George Guthrie (bio coming)
California
fiddle
For nearly four decades, Laurie Lewis has gathered fans and honors for her powerful and emotive voice and her versatile, dynamic songwriting. And she is an inspiration and a ground-breaker – across genres, across geography and across gender barriers. Laurie has shown us how a woman can blend into any part of the classic bluegrass singing trio, and she showed us how a great voice could move fluidly between bluegrass and other types of music.…
Max Malone
A life in music is practically unavoidable when you’re born into a family of musicians. Max Malone was weaned on country music in the rural wilds of Ontario, through both the radio and his mother’s work as a background vocalist on the Tommy Hunter show. By the age of twelve he was performing as a singer and bassist with his family band on a weekly gig in Toronto’s Cabbagetown.…
Emily Miller
Emily Miller is the Artistic Director of the Augusta Heritage Center, the string band director of the college’s Appalachian Ensemble, and a professional singer and fiddle player. At Augusta, Emily works with the director to oversee all programming and helps the theme week coordinators to execute a joint artistic vision. She received her BA in Anthropology-Linguistics from Brown University and her MS in Speech-Language Pathology from Vanderbilt University.…
Valerie Mindel
Val Mindel is a longtime musician, teacher and workshop leader, known for helping singers achieve the sound they want and have fun doing it. She teaches a wide range of harmony styles from the buzzy sound of American old-time and early country harmony to the weaving harmonies of songs from across the ocean. In the process she addresses such indefinables as tone, ornamentation and lead singing.…
Sarina Partridge
Sarina Partridge is a musician, song-leader, educator and activist based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She feels most alive when learning, creating and sharing songs — especially songs that grow out of time spent in wild places. Sarina sings with a wide variety of music projects: community song-leading of her own original songs; harmony-rich original music with folk trio Heartwood; performing and teaching vocal harmony folk music music she’s studied with master teachers around the world; and performing and teaching of Eastern European and Yiddish song – her own musical lineage.…
Dawn Pemberton
Dawn Pemberton has deep musical roots that take her powerful voice from gospel and soul to jazz, funk and world music. She has become a staple of the Vancouver music scene and can often be found tearin’ it up as a vocalist, teacher, facilitator, choir director and “go to girl” for live performances and studio sessions.…