Our Teaching Team
Sara Maria Blanton
Sara Maria teachers private violin and viola lessons to our beginner-intermediate students and cello to our beginner students. She also is the lead teacher for our Refugee Hope Partner’s String Program and is one of the collaborative zoom teaching artists.
Sara Maria Blanton is the founder and executive director of The Raleigh Music Collective as well as the executive director of the CODA Strings Camp. She graduated from Christopher Newport University (CNU) where she received her Bachelors of Music with a double concentration in violin performance and music education and a minor in leadership. She studied under Yun Zhang, the associate concert master of the Virginia Symphony Orchestra. While at CNU, she served for three yeas as the concert master in the CNU University Orchestra. She also played first violin for the CNU quartet and the CNU string ensemble. Her senior year at CNU, she won the CNU Concerto Competition and performed the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto in E minor with the CNU orchestra. She performs with The Raleigh Symphony, Durham Symphony, Chamber Orchestra of the Triangle, DITA Orchestra, and has recorded with artists such as Jess Ray, Mission House and Ryan of Sleeping at Last. Mrs. Blanton has been teaching private violin, viola, and cello lessons for over six years. She is a certified as a Bornoff Level I instructor.
Paige Capes
Paige Capes teaches private cello lessons to our intermediate and advanced cello students. She also is one of our Squad Saturday Teaching Artists and works with our Refugee Hope Partner’s String program.
Paige graduated from the DePauw University School of Music and the studio of Eric Edberg with a Bachelor of Music and Business. Her concentration was cello performance, where she studied solo, orchestral, and chamber music repertoire. She also studied with Robert Jesselson at the SC Governors School of the Arts and Pamela Frame at Interlochen Arts Camp. Her work in the Arts has taken her to the SC Governors School for the Arts, the Atlanta Symphony, Royal Festival Hall in London, and Opera Carolina in Charlotte. Locally Paige has played improvisationally and recorded cello with singer-songwriters such Taylor Leonhardt, Jess Ray, Jonathan and Amanda Noel, Christa Wells, ALL TRIBES Music, and Jill Paquette. She also enjoys playing throughout the Triangle for weddings, private events and churches. As much as she loves her musical work, Paige’s greatest work in partnership with her husband Adam is being mom to four kids who also love music and playing a range of instruments. Paige and Adam met in a piano practice room at DePauw while connecting over Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No.
Alexa Rose
Alexa Rose Johnson teachers private violin and viola lessons to our advanced students. She also works with our Squad Saturday students and is one of the collaborative zoom teaching artists.
Alexa Rose Johnson is a performer, and a violin and viola teacher. She began the violin at her elementary school in New Hampshire at the age of nine. She participated in youth orchestras at the New England Conservatory as part of their Preparatory Program, as well as studied with various teachers there. She received her undergraduate degree in Music from Syracuse University, and her Masters in Violin Performance from the University of Houston. She has studied with Dr. Kirsten Yon, Dr. Peter Rovit, Antoine van Dongen, Jenny Stirling, the late Mimi Bravar, and Michelle Cronin. Before moving to the Raleigh area in 2019, she performed and taught in Houston, TX for seven years. Her teaching experience includes the Coda program (part of Houston Youth Symphony), which is an El Sistema based program that focuses on group lessons and orchestra. She also taught for the Melody program through Houston Youth Symphony, which offered free private lessons to elementary students who otherwise would not have had the opportunity. She has taught private violin and viola lessons to students of all ages since 2012.
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Jacob Hermsen
Jacob works with our Squad Saturday students and is one of the collaborative zoom class teachers.
Jacob Hermsen – holds postgraduate and undergraduate degrees in Viola Solo and Orchestra Performance from the Conservatory of Amsterdam, the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, and the Musik Hochschule ‘Carl Maria von Weber’ Dresden where he studied with Nobuko Imai (Vermeer Quartet), Vladimir Bukac (Talich Quartet), and Michael Gieler (Principal Violist of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam). For more than 10 years, Jacob has been professionally engaged with orchestras and opera houses in The Netherlands, Germany, and Austria. He plays regularly with the North Carolina Symphony, Opera Carolina, Carolina Ballet, Carolina Philharmonic, and the Mallarmé Chamber Players. Jacob is a passionate chamber musician and co-founder of Vida Strings: a string quartet combining Music & Medicine through concerts, research, and workshops. He performed at festivals such as the ‘Grachtenfestival’ in Amsterdam, the ‘Palais Sommer Festival’ in Dresden, 'Music Academy of Villecroze' in Paris, 'Franco- Czech Academy of Music' in Telč, and NC State's 'Flourish Mental Health Festival'. Concert tours brought him to Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Ireland, Italy, Hungary, Czech Republic, France, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Israel, and the USA. When he is not busy performing, Jacob is also a viola teaching artist with Kidznotes and the founder of NC Strings Studio.
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Joyu Lee
Joyu works with our Squad Saturday students.
Joyu (she/her) is a Senior Therapist at UNC Health in Chapel Hill, NC, and primarily works with teens and young adults with eating disorders and in mental health. She provides re-educative, insight building music psychotherapy sessions for groups and individuals.
Since 2014, Joyu has worked as a Creative / Expressive Arts therapist at Cherry Hospital (Goldsboro, NC), Central Regional Hospital (Butner, NC), and as a Music Therapist at Advocate Lutheran General Hospital and Children's Hospital (Park Ridge, IL), at Hidden Stream Counseling (Raleigh, NC), and Voices Together (Chapel Hill, NC).
Joyu is trained in the Bonny Method Guided Imagery and Music (GIM- Music Psychotherapy) and is a Fellow of the Association for Music and Imagery. Joyu was mentored by Dr. Dag Körlin (Swedish Psychiatrist, certified Psychotherapist, Supervisor and Primary Trainer of the GIM method, Director of “IMAGEing: European GIM Trainings”) for the “Music Breathing” certificate. Her “Music Breathing” research in the inpatient eating disorders unit has been approved by IRB, and she is the recipient of the 2021 Linda Keiser Mardis Research Grant from the Association for Music and Imagery. Joyu has completed Part I of III for the CREATING MANDALAS Certificate Program (CMCP), and is a Narrative Therapy influenced practitioner.
Joyu Lee (she/her), born in Taiwan and raised in New York state, is the owner of Music and Your Mind, LLC and a founding member of Vida Strings.
She completed her Music Therapy degree from Appalachian State University and has been a Board-Certified Music Therapist (MT-BC) since 2014. She received a BM in Cello Performance from the National Taiwan Normal University, and a MM in Cello Performance from the Cleveland Institute of Music. From 2008 - 2012, Joyu has been a core member of Hyogo Performing Arts Center Orchestra, Nishinomiya, Japan. For the 2019-2020 season, she was the Assistant Principal Cello with Opera Carolina in Charlotte, NC.
Joyu is a passionate and experienced therapist with 18+ years of combined international experiences in creative/expressive arts therapy, cello performance, music education, and arts administration. Serving and working in the mental health medical field is her passion and focus as a music therapist. She sees the body and the mind as an intertwined system, particularly on how mental health impacts physical health, how physical health impacts mental health, and how music therapy can be used to alter both positively.