I am very excited to announce that I was granted a 2020 Independent Artist Award from the Maryland State Arts Council. The award recognizes notable artistic achievement and offers a $10,000 grant to encourage artistic growth and sustained practice. Read the full press release and a statement from First Lady Yumi Hogan. 

This fall, I will be joining the faculty of Shepherd University to lead undergraduate guitar studies as well as offer classes in their community music program. I am very excited about recruiting and building a studio at Shepherd, and mentoring students in ways that encourage artistry and community.

I was scheduled to give a lecture at the Guitar Foundation of America Convention this month in Indianapolis. The convention has been recreated as an online experience and is free to the public. My lecture will air on June 22 as a pre-recorded video followed by a live Q&A session. The lecture celebrates the careers and music of several women throughout classical guitar history including Luise Walker, Ida Presti and Maria Luisa Anido.Visit the GFA website for schedule and registration.

Danny Webber and I were invited to take part in the Seven Tones Project created by Paul Glenshaw and honoring the music of Duke Ellington. We arranged "African Flower" and based our version on a beautiful, live solo piano performance given by Ellington (view on Youtube). I'm looking forward to seeing how a filmmaker sets our recording to images and I'll share the video when it has been completed. In the meantime, you can read the write-up about the Seven Tones Project in the Washington Post at the link below.

I met Paul several months ago when he asked to feature one of my recordings in The Lafayette Escadrille, a documentary about American volunteers who "flew and fought for France in World War I, becoming the founding squadron of American combat aviation." (IMDB)

Throughout April and May 2020, I presented a social media activity in which artists of various mediums were invited to create their own part to add to my arrangement of an excerpt from "Je te veux," a song by French composer Erik Satie. The artists made videos of themselves in split screen performing with me. The response was wonderful and videos were created by dancers, poets and musicians in the US as well as abroad in places such as the UK and Turkey. Someone stated, "Wow, you have a lot of interesting and talented friends!" For this, I am so very grateful. 

To view the virtual collaborations, you can visit the public Facebook post where all of the videos are posted in the comments section. 

I want to offer congratulations to my friend, Tobias Hurwitz, who wrote music for "an audio-visual game experience designed for patients recovering from strokes" (PRSGuitars) developed by The Kata Design Studio at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and MSquare Healthcare. Click the link to read more about this project.