About Kaleigh
Kaleigh Acord, appointed professor of Violin and Viola at Indiana University of Pennsylvania in August 2024, aims to help her students cultivate trust in their own ability to tackle challenges, musical and otherwise. Her fifteen years of teaching experience have brought her opportunities to work with students of nearly age and levels: she held a teaching assistantship at Longy School of Music and Wellesley College under the tutelage of Prof. Laura Bossert’s(2012-15), as well as faculty positions at UW-Madison’s Community Music School (2017-20), Lyricafest Chamber Music Festival (2012-15), Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestra’s Music Makers (2021-24), and Madison Conservatory (2021-24), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit which seeks to address access barriers in music education.
A passionate chamber musician, Kaleigh has appeared as a guest with the LunArt Festival, Willy Street Chamber Players, and Caroga Lake Music Festival. She participated in the first-ever cohort of fully-funded fellows at Green Mountain Chamber Music Festival in 2023. To better share share her love of chamber music, she coordinated the first-ever Madison Conservatory and Friends Chamber Music Workshop in June 2024. The workshop brought together 20 local students for six days of rehearsals, and to Capitol Lakes Retirement (Madison, WI) for a final benefit concert in support of Madison Conservatory. Several participants gained their very first chamber music experience through the Madison Conservatory and Friends program.
Dedicated to cultivating relationships with living composers, Acord’s debut album comprises six American works written from 2000 to 2019. Twenty-First Century American Storytellers is available to stream on Spotify. Two of the six works were written specifically for her. She is also featured on violinist and arts advocate Ava Shadmani’s 2024 release, I Will Greet the Sun Again, a compilation of modern classical chamber music inspired by Persian folk music.
Acord completed her Doctoral studies in Violin Performance at the University of Wisconsin, Madison’s Mead Witter School of Music in 2020. At UW, she studied with Soh-Hyun Park Altino, participated in several of the most ambitious student chamber music programs in the school’s recent history, and held the highly esteemed Paul Collins Fellowship from 2017 to 2020. She earned a Graduate Performance Diploma from the Peabody Institute in Baltimore, supported in part by the Valerie SIingluff Violin Scholarship, and holds both a Master’s of Music and an Undergraduate Diploma from the Longy School of Music of Bard College in Cambridge, MA. Her other primary teachers include Violaine Melancon, Laura Bossert, and James Batts.
In March 2014, Kaleigh made her radio debut on WQXR’s McGraw Hill Financial Young Artist Showcase, playing Schoenfield’s “Souvenirs for Violin and Piano.”