The Virtual Academy

Lindsay Halford is the fine arts coordinator for Rutherford County Schools. She has also served as an elementary general music teacher and middle school band director. Halford holds degrees in music education from Middle Tennessee State University and a doctorate in learning organizations and strategic change from Lipscomb University. She advocates daily for arts education and supporting the teachers that provide this vital work in schools.

Randal Box retired in 2018 after twenty-seven years as director of bands at Brentwood High School and assumed the position of director of bands at the Academies of West Memphis High School and supervisor of instrumental music for the West Memphis School District in Arkansas. He retired from teaching in December 2021 and continues to maintain an active schedule as a guest conductor, concert and marching band adjudicator, and a presenter of clinics and student leadership workshops. Box is a past-president of the Middle Tennessee School Band and Orchestra Association and the Tennessee Bandmasters Association, a John Philip Sousa Foundation laureate, and in 2022 was inducted into the Tennessee Bandmasters’ Hall of Fame.

Michael Chandler is an assistant professor of music and coordinator of music education at Austin Peay State University in Clarksville, where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in music education and supervises student teachers. Chandler taught elementary general music in Texas public schools for sixteen years where his student groups performed as invited ensembles at the Texas Music Educators Association conference. He was a collaborative pianist for the Children’s Chorus of Greater Dallas for ten years and is the current founding conductor of the Clarksville Children’s Chorus. Chandler teaches all three levels of Orff Schulwerk basic and recorder in several teacher education courses across the United States. His work has appeared in the Southwestern Musician, Update: Applications of Research in Music Education, The Orff Echo, and Orff-Schulwerk International.

Michele Henry is division director and a professor of music education at Baylor University, where she teaches music education courses, supervises student teachers, and oversees the music education program. Specializing in vocal sight-reading instruction and assessment, Henry is the co-author of the Level Up! sight- reading series, which focuses on a systematic approach to individualized sight-reading instruction and assessment.

Sarah Hankins is a director, actor, teacher, and theatre administrator with a strong focus on collaboration, physical theatre, and heightened language. She recently joined the Tennessee Shakespeare Company as the manager of education and outreach. Hankins was recently the artistic director at Triad Stage, a professional regional theater in North Carolina, and previously she was a freelance theater artist in New York City. She has taught theater education programs from Maine to Florida, for students ranging from kindergarten to college, including teaching and directing at Greensboro College and Guilford College.

Amanda Pintore is a director, choreographer, and educator focusing on movement, dance education, devised theatre, and creating theatre and dance performances with and for children. She also specializes in arts integration, creative facilitation strategies, and training in teaching artistry. She is a Fulbright specialist, and in the fall of 2023 she collaborated with students and faculty at the Atlantic Technological University in Ireland.

Anne Grgich was born in Portland, Oregon, and has spent her whole life creating art in the Northwest. As a child, she exasperated her parents by taking books from the shelves and filling them with paintings. As a mature artist, some of her most popular works are based on the same principle. Grgich repurposes old library books into an unfolding series of complex canvases by adding collage, textural elements, and multiple layers of paints, while still allowing glimpses of the book’s original material to shine through. Grgich is one of ,the most original and innovative of the group of American artists known as Outsiders. In addition to profiles in many publications and to showings and exhibitions in this country and abroad, Grgich’s work is in the permanent collections of many international museums. She has curated more than fifteen exhibitions and is currently an online art teacher at Sonheim Studios.

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Lori Santos grew up with a family interlaced in Hawaiian, Portuguese, Puerto Rican, and Taíno cultures. She has worked with Indigenous artists and art education communities worldwide, including Canada, Mexico, Tonga, Peru, and the United States. She earned her PhD in art education with a specialization in art history of the Americas from the University of North Texas in Denton. Santos supports the inclusion of contemporary Indigenous artists to expand place-based concepts in art education. Her recent scholarship emphasizes Indigenous pedagogies and art as stories of place, identity, and environment. She is the founder of the Puzzle Peace Pledge Project.