Lori Şen

Mezzo-Soprano, Shenandoah Conservatory 

Turkish mezzo-soprano and Fulbright alumna Dr. Lori Şen is known for her versatility in many vocal genres, including opera, art song, musical theatre and jazz, as well as for her teaching and research interests in vocal literature, voice pedagogy and voice science. Şen regularly collaborates with musicians and composers across a variety of genres, and has performed in Turkey, Europe and the United States. 

A leading expert of the Sephardic art song genre, Şen is the first ever to catalog this repertoire that comprises Western classical settings and arrangements of traditional Sephardic folk literature. She is also the first to create a Ladino diction guide exclusively for singers who would like to sing Sephardic songs in their original language. 

Şen currently teaches as Assistant Professor of Vocal Pedagogy at Shenandoah Conservatory, and as Voice Faculty at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University. She completed her Doctor of Musical Arts degree in voice performance at the University of Maryland, College Park, and received her Master of Music in voice performance and pedagogy at Westminster Choir College, in Princeton, New Jersey, as a Fulbright grantee. She also holds a Bachelor of Science degree in physics from the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey, in addition to a Bachelor of Music degree in voice and a Master of Education degree in physics from Dokuz Eylül University in Izmir, Turkey.