Leanny Muñoz (she/her) is a Ph.D. student at UC
Davis with experience in music performance, secondary and higher
education, and professional development. She received her
master’s degree in musicology (music history) from Louisiana
State University. Her academic research areas are in Latin
American music and cultural diplomacy. As a first-generation
student herself, Leanny has a special interest in providing young
students with the tools necessary to succeed in college or in the
job market. She believes that music, like many of the arts,
provides students with vital soft skills such as time management,
self-agency, and most importantly, confidence! Combining her love
for music and education with her experience in university
admissions and recruitment, as well as her experience in career
development, she is happy to provide her time to the students in
Davis.
Emily Joy Sullivan is a composer, choral
conductor, and educator from Buffalo, NY. She founded and
directed various choirs and a cappella groups over the last
fifteen years. In 2013, she founded Common Chords, a community
choir initiative with groups in New York City and South Africa
that served middle schoolers, high schoolers, and adults. She
holds master’s degrees in both music composition and Childhood
General Education. For three years, she was the choral music
Teaching Artist at the Buffalo Center for Arts and
Technology. Emily loves making music with people and
empowering them to be creative. She believes everyone is
musical—and deserves the chance to unleash that musicality! She
is working on a PhD in music theory and composition at UC Davis,
where she can be found singing with the Chamber Singers, learning
to play the drum set, or composing a fairy-tale musical!
Jennifer Sherrill is a performer and music
teacher from Chicago, the best sports city in the world!! (Need
we say, Bulls!!) She has a decade of officiating soccer under her
belt and worked as a youth soccer liaison for the Chicago Fire
Soccer Team. She also sang the national anthem for multiple
Chicago sports teams. She is currently working toward a PhD
in ethnomusicology and spends her summers in the refugee camps of
Lesvos, Greece where she teaches music classes and plays pick-up
soccer (badly).
Alex Rossi is working towards his PhD in
ethnomusicology and has worked prior as an elementary school
music teacher and as a middle and high school band director. Alex
has also taught martial arts to students as young as 3, and as
old as 65, while working as the head instructor for a Premier
Martial Arts school in Nashville, Tennessee. Outside of teaching
and school, Alex is also a performer, serving as the principal
tuba player of the UC Davis Symphony orchestra as well as a sub
for the Camelia Symphony in Sacramento.
Tracy Monaghan (she/her) is a PhD student in
musicology whose work focuses on issues of race, gender, and
musical appropriation in 20th- and 21st-century opera. She is a
soprano and an avid performer of new music, favoring extended
vocal techniques. Tracy also works to dismantle food insecurity
in her communities. She is currently based in the Bay Area of
California.
Paul Engle is a musician from Los Angeles, where
he spent much of his musical life as a guitarist and songwriter.
His formal music training began at Los Angeles City College with
an emphasis in jazz guitar and composition. Paul holds a Bachelor
of Fine Arts in Composition & Experimental Sound Practices from
CalArts, where his teachers included Andrew McIntosh, Wolfgang
von Schweinitz, and Marc Lowenstein. His recent works embrace
nuanced differences of sameness and invite interactions of
procedural austerity with will and intuition. Currently, Paul is
pursuing a Ph.D. in composition and theory at UC Davis.
