Faculty & Staff

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Amanda Curcio is the appointed executive director of the Chamber Music Society and the Faulkner Chamber Music Festival's coordinator. Amanda is active in the musical community, as the principal first violinist in the Arkansas Symphony's community orchestra and a violinist in local chamber music ensembles. She began studying the violin in New York, where she grew up, when she was 7. 

Amanda is a U.S Army engineer officer and served two tours to Iraq as an intelligence analyst. She's a former English Language Arts middle school teacher. Before commissioning, Amanda worked for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette as an investigative reporter, winning Journalist of the Year in 2018 from the Society of Professional Journalists.

Ryan Mooney started the violin at the age of four with his aunt, Margaret Pressley. He then switched to viola at age 15 and went on to study with Ian Swenson and Jodi Levitz at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. He has attended such music festivals as Roundtop and Tanglewood where he had the pleasure of performing with the Mark Morris Dance Troup at Jacob’s Pillow. He was also a fellow of the Carnegie Hall exchange program where he performed with his quartet in Carnegie Hall and on a Central Asian tour. Ryan has a large studio of violin and viola students, and teaches at the Community School of the Arts at UCA in Conway. He is married to Cathi Whaley and is a new father to Carter Emerson Mooney.

 Er-Gene Kahng is a violinist, researcher, and educator whose work came to the fore through her advocacy of black composer Florence Price. Her recording of Florence Price’s Violin Concertos (Albany Records, 2018) has been cited and praised as an important contribution to American classical music, and has aired on programs like NPR’s Songs we Love, and APM’s Performance Today.  

Er-Gene serves as concertmaster with the Fort Smith Symphony. Er-Gene is also a member of Chineke!, the first majority BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) orchestra in Europe, whose motto is “championing change and celebrating diversity in classical music.” 

Previously, Er-Gene held title positions with the North Mississippi Symphony Orchestra, SoNA, Baton Rouge Symphony Orchestra, the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, and section positions with the Lancaster Symphony, and New Haven Symphony. Other collaborations include co-curating a new music series “Fuse” (at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art), Texas Ballet Theater, the Hong Kong Arts Academy, performances with Norfolk Symphony (UK), Portland-Columbia Symphony, and Camellia Symphony.

Er-Gene is the Professor of Violin, and the Director of Graduate Studies at the UA-Fayetteville. She was a Visiting Wolfson Fellow at the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, UK, and received degrees from UCLA, Yale and Northwestern.

Violinist Katherine Williamson has been an arts partner of the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra and Rockefeller String Quartet since October of 2013. A native of Saint Paul, Minnesota, Williamson is also currently a substitute violinist for the Minnesota Orchestra and spent the summer of 2015 playing in Minneapolis as part of the Mill City Summer Opera Orchestra. 

Music has taken Ms. Williamson from the rolling hills of the Meadowmount School of Music in New York, to the mountains of Breckenridge, to the stage of the Konzerthaus in Berlin. She has served as associate concertmaster of the National Repertory Orchestra, section violin of the Moritzburg Festival Orchestra, and section violin of the Lakes Area Music Festival. She has also been an associate member of the Chicago Civic Orchestra and has played as a semifinalist with the New World Symphony. 

Katherine graduated from Indiana University in December of 2012 where she received a Bachelor of Music with Distinction under the instruction of Professor Mark Kaplan. While at IU, she also studied pedagogy under Dr. Brenda Brenner and Mimi Zweig.