Violist Daphne Gerling enjoys an international career teaching, performing, and writing.
Daphne’s travels and performances have taken her to more than thirty universities around
the United States and to more than fifteen countries across the globe. An advocate for
contemporary music, she has participated in commissioning projects with composers Libby
Larsen and Jorge Variego, leading to premieres in Tennessee, Georgia, Los Angeles, and in
Rome and Cremona, Italy. As a chamber musician, she has appeared with Dallas’ Chamber
Music International and Art Music series, as well as Sounds Modern in Fort Worth. As a
concerto soloist, Gerling has performed works by Clarke, Mozart, Hindemith, and Weber in
Texas, Brazil, and at Vietnam's Saigon Opera House. Ms. Gerling is also a former summer
fellow of Lincoln Center Education in New York City.

In summer 2022 she used her Avaloch Farms Music Institute residency to develop her
recording project featuring works by female composers who may have participated in the
1919 Coolidge competition. “Encircling”, her debut album with pianist Tomoko Kashiwagi,
is under contract with Acis Productions. Her recording of "Peace" by Jessie Montgomery,
will appear in the AVS Presents 2025 Recording project.

She began her research on the 1919 Viola works  as a visiting scholar at the University of
Cambridge faculty of music in 2005. Her dissertation, “Connecting Histories: Identity and
Exoticism in the 1919 Viola Works of Ernest Bloch, Rebecca Clarke and Paul Hindemith
(2007) is available digitally through Rice University. Dr. Gerling studied viola, vocal
performance, and historical musicology at Oberlin Conservatory, the Cleveland Institute of
Music, and Rice University. She is deeply grateful to have been mentored by viola
professors Jeffrey Irvine, Lynne Ramsey, Karen Ritscher, and James Dunham, and to have
served as their graduate teaching assistant throughout her degrees. She undertook further
studies with Heidi Castleman, Victoria Chiang, Joan DerHovsepian, Thomas Riebl, and
Simon Rowland-Jones. She completed long-term Suzuki teacher training in Books 1-4 with
Teri Einfeldt, and books 5-9 with Elizabeth Stuen-Walker, and loves working with pre-
college students. Dr. Gerling’s students currently hold teaching and performing positions
throughout the United States, Brazil, South Korea, and the United Kingdom. She is
currently Assistant Professor of Viola at the University of North Texas, and President-Elect
of the American Viola Society.