Women leading Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in Music Education and the Music Industries

Alice Farnham is Co-founder and Artistic Director of Women Conductors with Royal Philharmonic Society, and Female Conducting with the National Concert Hall in Dubin –  ground-breaking and award-winning programmes encouraging women into conducting.  She is a guest teacher for Dallas Opera Hart Institute for Women Conductors, and Women on the Podium for Perth Symphony Orchestra. Recent conducting engagements include BBC Concert Orchestra, Calgary Opera, Folkoperan  Stockholm, Mariinsky Theatre, Royal Opera House, Welsh National Opera, Teatru Manoel, Grange Park Opera, Singapore Lyric Opera, English National Ballet, Danish Royal Ballet and Birmingham Royal Ballet.

Dame Evelyn Glennie is the world’s premier solo percussionist, performing worldwide with the greatest orchestras, conductors and artists. Her solo recordings exceed 40 CDs and are as diverse as her career on-stage. A double GRAMMY award winner and BAFTA nominee, Evelyn is also a composer for film, theatre and television. Evelyn was awarded an OBE in 1993 and has over 100 international awards to date, including the Polar Music Prize and the Companion of Honour. Evelyn is currently forming The Evelyn Glennie Collection with a vision to open a centre that embodies her mission to Teach the World to Listen.

Chi-chi Nwanoku (Chineke! Foundation).

Susan Wollenberg (musicologist, pianist and composer) was until October 2016 Professor of Music at the University of Oxford, College Lecturer at Brasenose, and Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall (now Emeritus Fellow). She co-edited, with Therese Ellsworth, The Piano in Nineteenth-Century British Culture (2007). She organized the Fanny Hensel bicentenary conference (Oxford, July 2005), editing the proceedings for Nineteenth-Century Music Review 4/2 (2007); and convened the symposium ‘Ethel Smyth and her generation’ (Oxford, 2008) partnered with the Ethel Smyth Symposium, Detmold, contributing to the proceedings (ed. Cornelia Bartsch, Rebecca Grotjahn and Melanie Unseld, 2010). With Aisling Kenny she co-edited Women and the Nineteenth-Century Lied (2015). She is co-editing, with Matthew Head, the Cambridge Companion to Women Composers.

Gabriella Di Laccio is an international award-winning soprano, recording artist, curator and activist, who has become one of the leading voices on the fight for equality in classical music. Listed as one of the BBC’s 100 most inspirational and influential women in the world in 2018, Gabriella is also the founder and curator of the Donne Foundation, an internationally recognised initiative that celebrates, advances and amplifies women in music. Recognised by Sir Charles Mackerras as ‘a singer of outstanding talent’, Gabriella is a most unique and innovative artist whose expressive qualities have earned her recognition and praise from international audiences.

Eleanor Kelly is a classical guitarist based in Merseyside, UK. Originally self-taught, after beginning formal study in Liverpool, Eleanor was awarded a performance scholarship and began guitar studies with Zoltán Katona. She is currently completing the prestigious Máster en Interpretación Guitarra Clásica course at Universidad de Alicante, Spain. Eleanor has extensive experience as a performer. In 2020, she was awarded a EuroStrings scholarship to attend the Uppsala Internationella Gitarrfestival in Sweden, where she gave a solo recital. She is an International Guitar Foundation Young Artist Platform artist and will make her London début as part of the scheme and première works commissioned by IGF for her at Kings Place, London, in 2021. In 2019, Eleanor gave the UK première of Claudia Montero’s Luces y Sombras with the Woodside String Quartet at the International Guitar Festival of Great Britain, and in 2020 she was a digital artist for the Illuminate Women’s Music concert series. From 2021, Eleanor will be a featured artist of the IGF programme: La Leona: women and the guitar.