I have taught music in grades K-9 and worked for 14 years as a faculty member of the National Autonomous University of Honduras, where I was coordinator of the Bachelor of Music program in 2016-2019. I have performed extensively as a collaborative pianist and was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship which allowed me to complete a Master of Music in Performance and Piano Pedagogy at Arizona State University (ASU) in 2021.

I am currently a PhD candidate in music education at the University of Western Ontario. With supervision from adam patrick bell, I am assistant to the editor of Canadian Music Educator, the quarterly journal of the Canadian Music Educators’ Association and the Journal of Music, Technology and Education. In 2023-2024, I was chair of the Society of Graduate Students in Music.

Since the fall of 2022 I have been a research assistant for Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador, an interdisciplinary research project where I am part of a large research team that seeks to precipitate justice, reconciliation, and societal healing in post-civil war El Salvador (1980-1992). My research in music, under supervision of Dr. Emily Abrams Ansari, is looking into the roles of music in the community during and after the civil war.

Research

My dissertation research will focus on three projects. The first one will describe and analyze the recurring and annual massacre commemoration event in Las Aradas. The second project will focus on two community arts centers that have been operating in Suchitoto and Segundo Montes for over a decade, providing healing spaces through music and the arts for youth, children and adults.

The third project will describe a series of workshops I facilitated in northern Chalatenango in the summer of 2023. Youth leaders and I co-designed music-making workshops using iPads as the medium to engage in songwriting informed by dialogue and historical memory.

Besides the projects highlighted in my dissertation research, I am also actively involved in field recordings of songs by the community, the design of a digital music archive that documents music and song from the region and editing two songbooks curated by community members.

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