Dr. Kara Eubanks, Director
Kara Eubanks is the director of the Willamette Violin Academy. She teaches violin, music theory, and pop music.
Kara has performed solo and chamber music across the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Holland, and the Czech Republic. She has performed solo and chamber music at New York City’s Lincoln Center, in New York’s Music in Midtown series, at the Pablo Casals Festival, and at Zeist Music Festival. As a recitalist, Kara has been featured at Chicago’s Fine Arts Building and New York City’s Elebash Hall. Her orchestral career includes membership in the Chicago Civic Orchestra, the Fontainebleau Chamber Orchestra in Paris, France, and the DiCapo Opera Orchestra of New York City. In 2014, she was inducted into the Sycamore Music Hall of Fame in her hometown of Sycamore, Illinois.
She also maintains an active career as a recording artist and popular-music performer. Kara has been featured on mtv.com, National Public Radio, and daytrotter.com, and on record labels such as Eenie Meenie and Lookout! Records. Her discography includes arrangements and performances with Troubled Hubble, The Gunshy, Future Monarchs, and Andrew Jackson Jihad.
Kara has been a member of the faculty at Northern Illinois University and at the CUNY Brooklyn Conservatory, and has taught music theory at the University of Oregon. In the summers, she teaches at Japan-Seattle Suzuki Institute and the Oregon Suzuki Institute.
Lillie Manis,
Violin and Viola
Widely recognized for her work as a Suzuki educator, Lillie Manis is currently completing her doctorate at Teachers College, Columbia University, where her research focuses on studio teachers' holistic strategies for cultivating expressive performance in young violinists. From 2009-2020, she was a faculty member at the University of Oregon School of Music and Dance, where she mentored graduate violin and viola pedagogy students and served as the Assistant Director of the Community Music Institute. In the first decade of her teaching career, both the members of her vibrant pre-college studio and her graduate student mentees have achieved noteworthy musical and professional success, including competition wins, full scholarships to major music schools and summer programs, and college teaching appointments. Active as a clinician, masterclass presenter, adjudicator and conference presenter at both the regional and national levels, she enjoys performing chamber music alongside some of the northwest's finest players, and recently joined the editorial committee of the American String Teacher. She is deeply grateful for all she's learned from the parents of her violin and viola students as she raises (and practices piano with!) her eight-year-old son, Ellery.
Dr. Drew Nobile, Music Theory, Composition, and Popular Music
Drew Nobile is Assistant Professor of Music Theory at the University of Oregon, a position he has held since 2015. At the Willamette Violin Academy, Drew teaches private theory and composition lessons.
Before coming to the UO, he served on the faculties of the University of Chicago and Brooklyn College. Drew’s music theory research focuses on harmony and form in classic rock music, mathematical applications to 20th-century music, and rhythm and meter in tonal music. His work has received the Patricia Carpenter Emerging Scholar Award, the Dorothy Payne Award, and the Barry S. Brook Dissertation Award. In a former life, Drew was an active violinist, having performed across the country in venues including Lincoln Center in New York, Benaroya Hall in Seattle, and Symphony Hall in Boston.