Ellie Phillips is a music educator and performer committed to expanding and reshaping the scope of possible audiences, artistic creators, and meanings. She performs primarily as a violist and conductor. Ellie is assistant principal violist of Newport Symphony; she has also performed on Baroque violin & viola with Oregon Bach Festival’s Berwick Academy and Oregon Bach Collegium. Ellie is interested in critical study of music as a phenomenon of class, gender, and cultural hegemony in both popular and classical music spaces. She is currently working on a popular criticism of classical music culture-industry from a post-Adornian perspective. Other research interests include historically-informed performance topics and music as a political subject in European and American history. In the future, she hopes to expand her work as an educator through partnership with community programs to provide free lessons to low-income students.

Ellie earned a Bachelor of Music in Viola Performance from Oregon State University in 2023. As a soloist and chamber musician, she regularly appeared on OSU’s Music à la carte series. In April 2023, Ellie conducted three public performances of Die Fledermaus by Johann Strauss II, performed by OSU Opera Workshop. She has taught undergraduate-level music courses at OSU as a teaching assistant. Her former violin and viola teachers include Jessica Lambert, Peter Slowik, Lisa Zweben, Lori Givens, Brian Quincey, and Camilla Wilson-Scott. Ellie would also like to thank Portland Youth Philharmonic for six years of orchestral training in 2011-2017. She has also studied at Oberlin Conservatory, Meadowmount School of Music, the National Symphony Orchestra Summer Music Institute, and FearNoMusic’s Young Composers Project. Ellie enjoys developing her music pedagogy with her students as they learn, and is excited to learn about music, learning, and the human experience itself from her students every day.