Performing-Teaching
Violining
Lisa Burrell earned her undergraduate degree at the University of Virginia with a Distinguished Major in Music and a Minor in History. She completed her Masters in Performance and Pedagogy at Northern Illinois University, and earned a DMA in Violin Performance, with a minor in Music Theory, from the University of Houston. She has studied violin with Raymond Montoni, Mark Rush, Mathias Tacke, Shmuel Ashkenasi and Lawrence Wheeler.
She is a member of the Key West Symphony and has performed as concertmaster of the Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp Faculty Orchestra, the Fox Valley Symphony, the Kishwaukee Symphony and the Northern Illinois University Philharmonic. She has also performed as principal second violin with the Bowdoin Festival Orchestra, the Rockbridge Symphony Orchestra and the Charlottesville and University Symphony Orchestra.
Lisa performs regularly on faculty solo, chamber music, and new music concerts at Sam Houston State University. She collaborates with the summer staff at PAI at Wyoming Seminary in chamber music performances. She has appeared as soloist with the Virginia Commonwealth University Symphony and the Camerata Rotunda Chamber Orchestra in addition to recital performances throughout the East Coast, Texas and Illinois. She performs with the River Road Chamber Music Project and the Burrell Blondel Duo. Recently she has been active in performing concerts to raise money for teacher education at the AFAL School in Las Cahobas, Haiti.
As a dedicated performer of chamber music, Lisa is interested in bringing contemporary and standard classical chamber music literature to a wider audience. She is particularly interested in multi-disciplinary presentations involving fine art, music, drama and literature which bring greater meaning to new and old works and which reveal the interconnectedness of all the arts. Her doctoral document "Music, Narrative, and Sexual Morality in the Kreutzer Sonatas of Beethoven, Tolstoy and Janacek" is part of a long-term project on music, art and literature in performance.
Teaching
Lisa Burrell teaches violin and viola in Houston, TX, and serves as a regular clinician for Houston area public schools. Her current project, Chamber Music in the Public Schools, involves a series of in-school technique clinics and chamber music coachings sessions, designed to strengthen school orchestra programs. Lisa served on the Violin/Viola Faculty of Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, from 2004-2009. She has been on the summer faculty of the Performing Arts Institute of Wyoming Seminary in Kingston, PA since 2005.
Lisa Burrell has taught studio violin/viola at the college level for 15 years along with classes in chamber music and pedagogy. She also has a private studio of 18 high school violin and viola students. Her students have participated in Texas Regional and All-State Orchestras, the Greater Houston Youth Orchestra, Houston Youth Symphony, Virtuosi of Houston and Houston All-City Orchestra, several earning concertmaster and principal positions. Her graduating high school students have earned top music and academic scholarships at their respective colleges and universities.Lisa has also served on the faculty of the Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp, as a faculty intern at the Eastern Music Festival, as a performance fellow at the Bowdoin Summer Music Festival and a Chamber Music Fellow at the Hampden-Sydney Music Festival. She has been a studio teacher for undergraduate non-major violin students at Northern Illinois University and an adjunct faculty member at the University of Houston, teaching the violin and viola string methods class. In her teaching she is commited to both the intellectual and musical development of all of her students.