The Street Symphony founder will mentor students and lead a fellowship exploring music’s role in underserved communities
The violinist, author and community musician Vijay Gupta has been appointed by the New England Conservatory (NEC) as joint scholar-in-residence for its Institute for Teaching Artistry during the 2026-27 academic year, alongside music educator Stephanie Muñoz.
The pair will work with students across NEC’s Conservatory and Expanded Education divisions, offering mentoring, class visits and specialist fellowships focused on teaching artistry and community engagement.
Gupta, who is founder and artistic director of the Los Angeles-based non-profit Street Symphony, will take up his residency in the spring of 2027, focusing on community-engaged music-making. His fellowship, entitled ’Building Community through Music at Common Art’, will explore artistic work with people experiencing homelessness, incarceration, addiction and recovery. It will culminate in a performance at a community art space. He will also give a talk about his recent memoir, Restrung.
NEC alumna Muñoz will be in residence during the autumn of 2026. Her fellowship, ‘Steel Pan Teaching and Classroom Culture’, will examine music teaching in bilingual urban settings and among students who do not read music.
‘Community-engaged work asks us to move beyond simply preparing a performance and delivering it unchanged from one place to another,’ said Gupta. ‘It asks us to pay attention – to the particular people in the room, to what they know and create, and to how relationship itself can change our artistic practice. I want students to have the experience of becoming more attentive musicians. The goal is not to manufacture transformation or prove that music has “solved” something, but to develop a more honest, specific and reciprocal approach to community-engaged performance.’
Announcing the appointments, Tanya Maggi, dean and chair of NEC’s Community Engagement and Professional Studies Department, said that the scholars’ ‘expertise, mentorship, real-world accomplishments, and dedication to advancing the field of teaching artistry will enrich the entire NEC community’.
Gupta and Muñoz succeed NEC’s inaugural scholar-in-residence, Dr Molly Gebrian, a violist and neuroscientist who spent two years exploring links between neuroscience and musical practice before joining the conservatoire’s faculty.
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