Sarai Brinker

Sarai Brinker is a dedicated, award-winning educator engaged in teaching subjects related to music and society, globalization, popular music, creativity, and Western art music- everything from Hildegard to Taylor Swift. She is a facilitator and teaching artist for the Carnegie Hall Lullaby Project and Link Up Programs and a founder of the Lubbock chapter of the international storytelling organization Tenx9. She is a member of the Texas Tech Teaching Academy and a former TEACH Peer Consultant, TEACH Fellow, and a recipient of the Professing Excellence Award as well as the Texas Tech Spotlight Award for teaching excellence.

She holds B.A. degrees in Natural History & Humanities and Music from Texas Tech University, an M.A. in Liberal Arts from Texas Christian University, and a Ph.D. in Fine Arts with an emphasis in musicology from Texas Tech University.

Her research background includes fieldwork in Ethiopia and Ghana, where she focused on worship music in the Ethiopian Orthodox Church and the impact of Christian Missionaries on worship hymns in Nalerigu, Ghana. Her doctoral research examined the impact of integrated arts practices in prenatal education and led to an affiliation with the Carnegie Hall Lullaby Project, a program that supports parental bonding with children through songwriting.

In addition to her work in musicology, she has a strong interest in the scholarship of teaching and learning and is a leader in incorporating and thinking about the use of artificial intelligence in the classroom and in creative spaces.

She believes teaching means being a part of a community searching for knowledge, truth, wisdom, and beauty- and that art and education have the potential to change the world.