Amy Hillis

About this Artist​

As a performer and educator, Amy mixes her passion for music with innovative thinking to inspire and challenge norms. She seeks to facilitate projects which build relationships inside and outside the concert hall.

COMMUNITY MUSIC:
Amy is currently Associate Professor of Community Music at York University’s School of Arts, Media, Performance and Design. She leads courses that explore music’s ability to empower communities including her newly-established course, “Performing Arts in the Community: Engaging New Audiences”. As the Helen Carswell Chair in Community-Engaged Research in the Arts, she built partnerships between Community Music Schools of Toronto, residents of Toronto’s Jane & Finch neighbourhood, and York University’s researchers. At McGill University, Amy established a course titled "Chamber Music and Engaging New Audiences". She created this course to give undergraduate students experience in community engagement outside the university’s walls such as creating and performing their own school shows for elementary school students. Amy is also a founding member and manager of the prairie-based Horizon String Quartet, a group dedicated to engaging K-12 students with live chamber music. During seven different tours, the HSQ has performed over 200 interactive concerts for school assemblies in 100 different Canadian cities.

Amy is also the Artistic Director of the Women’s Musical Club of Toronto, a recital series established in 1898 to share live, world-class music-making, showcase Canadian musicians, and commission new chamber music works.

PERFORMANCE:
As a violinist, Amy has "a rich, warm sound and has mastered the violin with such ease, that it is impossible to ignore her passion in performance" (Ludwig Van Montréal). Originally from Regina, Saskatchewan, Amy collaborates with performers and composers around the world to explore new approaches to classical and contemporary music. She has commissioned new Canadian works by Matthew Brubeck, Fjóla Evans, Vincent Ho, Laurence Jobidon, Gabriel Dufour-Laperrière, Andrew Staniland, Jocelyn Morlock, Nicole Lizée, Carmen Braden, Randolph Peters and Jordan Pal. As part of the meagan&amy duo, Amy was selected as winner of the inaugural "Pan-Canadian Recital Tour" to perform 50 recitals across all thirteen Canadian provinces and territories during the 2019-2020 season. Her duo’s debut album titled Roots demonstrates the connections between select Canadian compositions and works from the traditional canon of classical repertoire. Amy is winner of the Eckhardt-Gramatté National Music Competition, the Canada Council’s Musical Instrument Bank competition on two occasions, an artistic residency at La Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, the McGill Concerto Competition, and the Sylva Gelber Foundation Music Award.

EDUCATION:
Amy holds a Doctor of Music in Violin Performance from McGill University, completed under the guidance of Axel Strauss and with the support of the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). She completed her Master of Music at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music with Ian Swensen and her Bachelor of Music at McGill University with Denise Lupien. Growing up in Regina, Amy studied with the concertmaster of the Regina Symphony Orchestra, Eduard Minevich.