Juliana Cantarelli Vita (she/her)

Juliana Cantarelli Vita is an Assistant Professor of Elementary and Early Childhood Music Education at the University of Hartford’s Hartt School. She completed a PhD in Music Education with an emphasis in Ethnomusicology at the University of Washington, with extensive training in the Schulwerk (and some in Kodály Pedagogy), while also giving attention to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Within that work, she has actively been a part of the Smithsonian Folkways World Music Pedagogy Course both at West Virginia University and at the University of Washington. Professor Cantarelli Vita has been a guest speaker at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Augustana College, Georgia State University, Florida International University, Gonzaga University, Seattle Pacific University, and Federal University of Pernambuco.

Blending her interests in music education and ethnomusicology, she has presented papers and given clinics at several national and international conferences in North America, South America, and Europe. As a researcher, she has published papers in The Orff Echo (Winter 2017 and Fall 2020), Perspectives: Journal of the Early Childhood Music & Movement Association (2018), and the Journal of Folklore and Education (2020), with a chapter on children's communities of practice in the maracatu de baque virado tradition on the upcoming Oxford Handbook of Early Learning and Development. In 2020, she joined The Orff Echo editorial board.

She has received research grants from the American Orff-Schulwerk Association (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 2020 she received the Elizabeth May (Slater) Award from the Society for Ethnomusicology for her paper on the topic of archived field recordings put in action by elementary school students.