Our Faculty
Dr. Regina Carlow, Music Director, UNM Children’s Chorus
Regina Carlow, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of music education at the University of New Mexico. She holds degrees from the University of Maryland, College Park, The Catholic University of America, and Westminster Choir College in the area of Music Education with an emphasis in Choral Conducting. Prior to her appointment at the University of New Mexico, she was artistic director of the Capitol Hill Youth Chorus in Washington DC, the music director of the Choral Arts Society of Frederick and held positions at the Anne Arundel Community College, the Frederick County Community College and for 20 years was a general and choral music teacher for Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland. She is the founding director of the UNM Children’s Chorus.
Dr. Carlow’s research and teaching interests include the study of the musical experiences of immigrant students, integrating special needs and culturally diverse students into music classrooms in the U.S. and creating service learning programs for pre-service music teachers. She has published in the Maryland Music Educators Journal and Spotlight on Teaching Chorus, the Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education, and is a contributing author in "Teaching Music in Urban Schools." Dr. Carlow has presented workshops on The Child Voice, Kodály Methodology, Healthy Choral Warm-ups for Adolescents, Using Jazz Chants with ESL Students and Music for Preschool Children. She has been a choral clinician and festival adjudicator in New Mexico, Washington D.C., Maryland and Virginia.
Julia Church Hoffman, Director UNM Children’s Chorus, Primary Chorus
Julia Church Hoffman is director of the UNM Children’s Chorus kindergarten through second grade division and a teacher of elementary music for the Albuquerque Public School’s fine arts program. Julia has been teaching for over 20 years. She began her teaching career in 1986 in the rural railroad/highway town of Winslow, Arizona where she taught sixth grade in an elementary school.
She returned home to Albuquerque in 1988 to teach language arts and social studies at John Adams Middle School. In 1993, Julia began a ten year position as the Director of Children’s Music at First Presbyterian Church, Albuquerque. During that time, she also taught pre-kindergarten through eighth grade music at Holy Ghost Catholic School, volunteered as a music teacher in her sons’ APS elementary schools, and discovered her passion for early childhood music while teaching at several Albuquerque preschools, including A Child’s Garden, St. Mark’s in the Valley Preschool, and Christina Kent Day Nursery. From 2004-2006, she taught music to infants through second graders at the UNM Music Prep School, and served for one year as the prep school’s graduate assistant while she began her Master of Music Education degree.
Her research interests include developmentally appropriate practice in early childhood music education, and music education philosophy as it shapes teacher curriculum choices. In 2007, she and Regina Carlow created a creative writing workshop for teachers of music as a venue to express their creative and reflective voices; an opportunity she believes is rare in our current educational climate of NCLB mandates. Julia holds a bachelor’s degree from The College of Wooster . She is completing the degree Master of Music with an Emphasis in Music Education at the University of New Mexico , and is Orff-Schulwerk certified.