Emily Bender
Soprano and Voice Teacher
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Emily Bender has been singing and performing all her life. Born into a choral family, she was attending choir rehearsals starting as soon as they would let her. Emily sang in school and church choirs growing up, and sang her first church solo at age 3. At age 10, Emily started performing in musicals, and continued that throughout high school and college. While at Oberlin College, Emily studied voice and sang in the Oberlin College Choir. She holds a BA in French from Oberlin as well as an MA in Interdisciplinary Art from San Francisco State. She began directing plays in high school, and then writing, directing and performing in her own scripts in college, as part of a Fulbright fellowship in France, and in graduate school. She also performed in the Poulenc opera Les Mamelles des Tirésias with Goat Hall Productions. For the past 15 years, Emily has sung and soloed with numerous groups, including: Tanglewood Festival Chorus and Coro Allegro in Boston; San Francisco Bach Choir, Pacific Mozart Ensemble and Solstice here in the Bay Area.
As a member of the Grammy-nominated Pacific Mozart Ensemble she performed in Carnegie Hall singing with the ensemble and soloing as part of the celebration of 40 years of Meredith Monk’s music. Currently, as a member of Bay Area A cappella champions and National top 3 a cappella act (Harmony Sweeps awards) Solstice, a septet, she regularly sings in at least 15 different languages and in genres including world folk, pop, jazz, rock, classical, avant-garde & more. She performed with Amy X Neuburg as part of a 6 voice chorus in Belliebig Füllen at the Jewish Music Festival in 2005 and, and reprised an expanded version at the Freight and Salvage in October, 2011. Emily has also been part of a recording of previously unrecorded Greek orthodox hymns called AXIOS.
