College of Visual and Performing Arts Dean bruce d. mcclung has announced the appointment of Billie Feather as Lecturer in Commercial Guitar.
Feather is a guitarist/songwriter/banjoist/bassist who hails from the Allegheny Mountains of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. She was most recently an assistant professor at Washington State University where she taught “Group Guitar,” “History of Film Music,” and “History of Women in Music” and designed a “Country Music History” course with a focus on equity, diversity, justice, and inclusion. Feather has also taught at Meredith College in Raleigh, teaching both college and community music school students. A certified Suzuki Guitar Instructor, Feather maintains an active and varied teaching studio with students of all ages and levels. Awarded a Career Development Grant from the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, Billie founded her own mobile recording endeavor called Feather Farm Recordings.
She performs with Hank, Pattie and The Current (bluegrass and classical fusion), The P-90’s (punk rock), Charles Latham and the Borrowed Band (country rock), The Holland Brothers (Piedmont style blues), Resonator (classical guitar and banjo duo with Hank Smith), and leads her own project called The Hallway Waltz. Feather’s performances have been hailed as “spectacular, athletic, and… narrative and epic rather than simply a recreation of recorded work” and a “live music find and stage presence of the first order and deserves the stellar career that is clearly in front of her” by the Camel City Dispatch blog.
Feather holds a Bachelor of Music (BM) degree from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts (UNSA) in Classical Guitar Performance, a second Bachelor of Music (BM) degree from North Carolina Central University in Jazz Studies with a focus in Jazz Guitar, and a Master of Music (MM) degree in Guitar Performance and a Professional Artist Certificate in Recording Engineering/Guitar from the UNCSA.