Dr. von Rueden is the Director of Choral Program and Associate Professor of Fine Arts at Hampden-Sydney College (HS-C) and the Founder/Director of The Piedmont Singers of Central VA.  She began her tenure at H-SC in the Fall of 2014, conducting the H-SC Chorus and teaching undergraduate music classes.  Recent projects for the Chorus have included tours to Boston, New Orleans, New York, and Puerto Rico, a collaboration with the Richmond Symphony in the 2015 Voices of Survival concert, and a 2018 performance of Dan Forrest's Requiem for the Living with Longwood University's choruses and orchestral ensemble. In Spring 2024, Dr. von Rueden introduced an experimental workplace choir for the college, the Tuesday Singers, to promote musical activity and wellbeing at the college.

 

Dr. von Rueden has worked with Capitol Opera Richmond, Chorus American as a Choral-Orchestral Fellow with coaches David Hayes and Jorge Mester and in the ADEI Learning Lab with Dr. Antonio Cuyler. At the University of California, Santa Barbara, Dr. von Rueden studied under Professor Michel Marc Gervais, and received a Doctor of Musical Arts in choral conducting. She was awarded a 2012 Central Fellowship for her dissertation work on the the use of figurative language to influence musical expressivity, vocal technique, and group collaboration.  She conducted the UCSB Women’s Chorus, an undergraduate ensemble of non-voice and voice majors, for four years.  She is a past conductor the UCSB Men’s Chorus, the Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum Chamber Singers in Cambridge, MA, and the choir at First Congregational Church in Santa Barbara. Previous training included an Apprenticeship at Berkshire Choral Festival with Grant Gershon, Anton Armstrong, Vance George, and Heinz Ferlesch, and a Fellowship to conduct at the Norfolk Music Festival’s Choral Conducting Workshop with Simon Carrington.  As an undergraduate at Harvard University, Dr. von Rueden studied choral conducting with Jameson Marvin and Kevin Leong.