With degrees in classical harp performance and over a decade of experience teaching and performing, Amy Nam looks forward to playing for your event or welcoming you into her teaching studio.
A confident and energetic performer, Twin Cities-based harpist Amy Nam has appeared as a soloist with the Vanderbilt University Orchestra, the McGill Contemporary Ensemble, the Sewanee Summer Music Festival Orchestra, and the St. Croix Valley Orchestra. This fall she will be featured as a soloist with the Luther College Symphony Orchestra.
She holds a master’s degree in harp performance from McGill University, where she studied harp with Montreal Symphony Orchestra principal harpist Jennifer Swartz, as well as a master’s degree in composition from the Eastman School of Music, where she studied harp with Kathleen Bride. She completed her undergraduate studies at Vanderbilt University, where she studied harp with Marian Shaffer and graduated with first honors as the Blair School of Music Founder’s Medalist.
Nam has written a number of works both for the harp and other instrumental ensembles. Currently, Nam is completing a commission for harp and two saxophones for the chamber ensemble keystring with support from the American Harp Society Grants Program. For their March/April 2023 issue, Harp Column magazine commissioned and published Nam’s solo harp work “An Exploration in Line and Color.” In 2020, Nam received funding through Chamber Music America’s Classical Commissioning program to write and perform a new piece with the Rochester, NY-based ensemble fivebyfive. In 2018 Nam’s work Somewhere to Elsewhere, for harp and ensemble, was selected from nearly 700 entries for a BMI Student Composer Award. In 2020, she won the Lyra Society’s 7th Annual Costello Competition for Composition.
Nam is on faculty at Luther College in Decorah, IA. She also teaches at Mt. Calvary Academy of Music in Excelsior, MN, Blessings Academy at the Hastings Arts Center in Hastings, MN, and maintains a growing private home studio.