Juliana Cantarelli Vita, Ph.D.

Juliana Cantarelli Vita is Assistant Professor of Elementary and Early Childhood Music Education at the University of Hartford’s Hartt School. Blending her interests in music education and ethnomusicology, Dr. Cantarelli Vita has published on children’s musical cultures, community music, world music pedagogy, feminist spaces for music-making, and Afro-Brazilian drumming traditions in the Journal of Folklore Education, Malaysian Journal of Music, The Orff Echo, and the International Journal of Community Music, with upcoming publications in the Journal of Popular Music Education, the Oxford Handbook of Early Childhood Music Learning and Development, and the Oxford Handbook of Feminism and Music Education. She has been a keynote speaker for the Pennsylvania Collegiate Music Educators Association Symposium, and a guest speaker at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Augustana College, Georgia State University, Florida International University, Gonzaga University, Seattle Pacific University, Case Western Reserve University, University of Washington, College of the Holy Cross, and Federal University of Pernambuco.

 

She earned a Ph.D. in Music Education with an emphasis in Ethnomusicology at the University of Washington, with training in the Schulwerk and Kodály Pedagogy, while also giving attention to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Within that work, she has actively been a part of the Smithsonian Folkways Certificate Course in World Music Pedagogy at West Virginia University (2015-2022), University of Washington (2018-2022), and directs the recently-launched course at The Hartt School. She has received research grants from the AOSA (for the work on collective song-writing at the Yakama Nation Tribal School) and the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (for the work with repatriated recordings), in which she received the Elizabeth May (Slater) Award from the Society for Ethnomusicology.

 

As a clinician, Juliana has given more than 50 workshops in the United States, Abya Yala/Latin America, and Europe. As an active musician, she established Seattle’s maracatu de baque virado ensemble, has been involved with rock camp for girls and gender-nonconforming youth, and is part of the duo Cria.