Carmen Granger is an orchestral musician throughout the southeast. She has performed with many symphonies and opera companies in Arkansas, Virginia and North Carolina. In the Summer of 2016, she won a job with Opera in the Ozarks in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, where she was assistant principal viola and performed many various operas as well as solo repertoire and chamber music. In the summer of 2015, she received a scholarship to attend the Brevard Music Institute where she studied viola with Scott Rawls and worked with conductors Keith Lockhart and Ken Lamb. While at the Brevard Institute, she had the pleasure of being able to study chamber music with Alistair MacRae and got to work with many of the programs’ student composers and was a part of many chamber and contemporary music concerts. Carmen is currently pursuing her Bachelor’s in Music Performance from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG) where she is a scholarship student of Dr. Scott Rawls. She is currently the principal viola of the Symphony Orchestra and performs with many different smaller ensembles within the school, including being the resident violist of the school’s contemporary music ensemble, Present~Continuous, the Gate City Camerata, Casella Sinfonietta and the UNCG Opera Orchestra. She has also had the pleasure of getting to work with Philip Glass, Molly Ringwald, and Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg during her time at UNCG. Carmen also enjoys playing the violin in the UNCG Sinfonia where she is one of the rotating concertmasters, and in the Fall of 2015 got to work with Turkish rockstar, Demir Demirkan. Carmen is also a music educator in North Carolina. She is the President for the Gate City American String Teachers Association (ASTA), and teaches for The Young Musicians of Alamance and the Community Arts Collaborative. Although her passion is performing, she also loves teaching private lessons and enjoys learning new ways to teach. Getting to perform in masterclasses has helped to improve her teaching style as well as her technique. She has performed for violists Michael Strauss, Pamela Ryan, and Elias Goldstein to name a few, as well as the Friction Quartet, Deadalus Quartet, and Decoda Quartet. Performing operas and musicals is Carmen’s true passion, but she loves being able to perform with so many symphonies and work with so many talented musicians.