Liza Barley holds a Bachelor of Music in Violin Performance from Vanderbilt University and a Master of Music in Music Leadership/Collaborative Composition from the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in London. Her primary teachers in the western classical world include Carolyn Huebl, John Kochanowski (viola), Paul Kantor, and members of the Cavani and Juilliard String Quartet.
In addition to growing up as a Suzuki student of Michele Higa George and being trained and certified in the method, Liza has been teaching Suzuki violin/viola for about 20 years all over the world, including the ten years she spent building and directing a Suzuki program and arts education and performance center in Arusha, Tanzania, East Africa. She is well-known in the Suzuki world and has been a guest clinician at workshops and institutes all over the U.S., Canada, Central America, Europe, Africa, and Japan.
In her performance life, Liza’s time spent outside the U.S. has brought lots of cross-cultural collaborations and work outside the classical genre of violin/viola playing. She has collaborated, learned from, and performed with various artists on projects in Argentina (Tango), Palestine (Arabic classical), the Gambia (Fula, Susu, and Wolof), Kenya and Tanzania (Congolese Highlife, African fusion), India (Carnatic), Greece (Rebetiko), Portugal (Fado), U.K. and U.S. (jazz, bossa nova, fusion, rock, experimental, electronic, devised theater music, and more), and has won awards as a versatile, multi-genre string composer and performer and sound artist.
Liza also spends a lot of time leading collaborative composition workshops. As a practitioner in this area, she has been hired repeatedly by the Baltimore Symphony and the Grand Rapids Symphony to run projects where orchestra musicians collaborate with members of the community to create performances of original work. Liza has collaborated with composers such as Jon Deak at the Kennedy Center Very Young Composers project and other institutions such as the London Symphony Orchestra, London Contemporary Dance School, BBC Studios in London, and countless others as a leader of collaborative composition projects.
In Pittsburgh, she is a long-time teaching artist with the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, designing and implementing educational musical experiences in collaboration with different artists and school teachers and is a certified Wolftrap Teaching Artist, through which she works with early childhood teachers to train them in integrating music and creative play into their classroom curricula.