Dr. Roselyn Hobbs is a Boston-based violist, music educator, and scholar. Roselyn’s scholarly research spans musicology, theory, and performance and has been presented at conferences across the country including College Music Society National Conferences at the American Viola Society Festival. She completed her Doctor of Musical Arts degree at The Hartt School, University of Hartford as a student of Steve Larson. Her dissertation, Never Second Fiddle: Women and the Making of American Viola Culture, examines the twentieth-century development of the viola as a solo instrument through the lens of critical gender theory and recovers biographical glimpses of American women on the frontier viola culture.

In addition to championing the sounds of the twentieth century, Roselyn was the first violist to graduate from Boston Conservatory with a Master’s degree in contemporary music performance and enjoys collaborating with composers to make music relevant to today’s world. While at the conservatory as a student of Lila Brown, she performed with contraBAND under the direction of Vimbayi Kaziboni and toured North America with Evan Ziporyn’s Black Star Project. Roselyn has performed as a guest with many Boston-based contemporary music projects and ensembles, including Black Sheep Contemporary Ensemble, Semiosis Quartet, and Ambient Orchestra. She regularly performs world premiers and commissions including solo viola and chamber works by John McDonald, Mara Gibson, Daniel J. Choi, Kevin Madison, inti figgis-vizueta, and Paul Zaba. Roselyn has performed at New Music Gathering, the SEAMUS 2019 National Conference, and the International Viola Congress in Portugal. She received her Bachelor of Music at the University of Tennessee under the tutelage of Hillary Herndon.

Roselyn is passionate about environmental conservation and serves on the board of Daraja Music Initiative, with whom she has been spending her summers teaching music and conservation in the Kilimanjaro region of Tanzania since 2016. As a fiber artist specializing in knotted laces, Roselyn is a skilled shuttle tatter and lace designer, centering her practice around designing geometric labyrinths and tessellations in lace. Most recently, her fiber work has been exhibited as part of Threaded: Contemporary Fiber in New England at Mosesian Center for the Arts. Roselyn is the author and illustrator of The Mpingo Coloring Book.