Teacher Bio - Laura Silva

Music and Art

Every day, August 19^th creeps closer and SOCA continues to come together. Over the last couple of weeks, one of our main projects has been to meet with our hired teachers and to bring them on the team. Today, we are excited to introduce you to our music and art teacher, Mrs. Laura Silva. A native of Venezuela, Mrs. Silva came to Athens in 2017 to study for a Master of Music in piano performance and pedagogy. While here she met and married her husband, and has enjoyed the area enough to not only start her PhD but also stay and work for SOCA.

Over the last twenty years and across multiple continents, Mrs. Silva has performed and taught the piano in a staggering array of contexts. Her repertoire extends from the Baroque period up to the present day, and she has premiered multiple pieces by contemporary composers. While in Venezuela, she pioneered a program of whole-group piano instruction and has continued to teach students of various ages and assist Music programs throughout Southeast Ohio. During her time at Ohio University, she has furthered her studies of performance and instruction and, especially in her Doctoral studies, has taken a more interdisciplinary approach, studying and teaching the arts as they relate to the lives of the people who make, perform, and enjoy them.

Mrs. Silva, even with all of her expertise and experience, is excited by the prospect of teaching K-6. To her, the opportunity to teach music and art to the same children for five days every week is thrilling. It affords a chance to develop these children’s skills and bring them to experience the arts in a way that few other forms of instruction allow, and the benefits will spill over to the rest of their lives and the communities in which they live.

Music is a powerful medium of art. But the full appreciation of music (especially Classical music) requires focused attention and a trained ear. Mrs. Silva does not expect that all of her students will become devoted musicians, but she does believe that the ability to listen sensitively and appreciatively to good music—and to enjoy other forms of art as well—is an important part of education and life. This is partially on display in her dissertation, which has studied the music of the Venezuelan diaspora from the last decade and how those works make use of allusions to traditional Venezuelan music and visual arts. In doing so, and throughout her long and rich career, she has gained a rich appreciation for the ability of the arts to enrich life and to help people navigate it. We are very honored to have Mrs. Silva joining us at SOCA and helping our students encounter goodness, truth, and beauty in the fine arts.