Elisa Sereno-Janz

Bio

 
 

Elisa Sereno-Janz graduated in 2014 with distinction from the BFA program at the Alberta College of Art and Design in Calgary, Canada. In the year 2010, after 27 years as a professional violinist and private violin and fiddle teacher, Elisa returned to school to study for a degree in Fine Art.  She enjoys working with a variety of materials, including painting, fibre and new media. In her new media project Fiddle Lights, she synthesizes her music with her art practice. She presented her paper FiddleLights: Kinetic Signatures - Visualisations of the Bow Hand Movements in Fiddle Tunes and Contemporary Violin Performance at the British Computer Society’s conference, Electronic Visualisation and the Arts in London, England in July 2013. It was peer reviewed and is published by the British Computer Society. Her paper The FiddleLights Project- An Artist’s Recording of Bow Hand Movements in Fiddle Tunes was also presented at the North Atlantic Fiddle Convention 2012 at the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland, and is pending publication, She will be presenting her paper The FiddleLights Project: Stylistic Documentation through Kinetic Portraits at the North Atlantic Fiddle Convention 2015 at the Cape Breton University, Nova Scotia. She is the recipient of several awards, including a Calgary Arts Development Artist Opportunity Grant (20150 and the Stanford Perrot Innovative Project Award (2012).


Elisa graduated from the University of Western Ontario, Canada with an HBMus and a BEd. She is interested in the idea of teaching music through folk songs, and particularly, teaching violin through folk songs and folk music. In 1989 she taught in a string program in Hampton, New Brunswick where she was introduced to Eastern Canadian fiddle music. After returning to Calgary, Elisa and her husband Tim Janz founded a Celtic traditional band, Prairie Ceilidh. In the eleven years that they performed, wrote music and toured, they also recorded two albums, Dry Island and Prairie Ceilidh Christmas. In 1998 Elisa started Baroque & Buskin’ Strings, now Blue Arch Strings, a community baroque and fiddle string orchestra where she remains as director. She and Tim have a music publishing company, Blue Arch Music where they publish their compositions and arrangements of folk and fiddle tunes for string orchestra and string quartet. Elisa also presented at the North Atlantic Fiddle Convention 2006 and her paper, Bridging Fiddle and Classical Communities in Calgary, Canada: The Baroque and Buskin' Strings was published in Driving the Bow (2008).


When Elisa isn’t making music or working in her studio, you can find her in her garden or traveling down a back road somewhere with Tim, exploring the Rocky Mountains or places far away.


CV