Active as a performer, writer, consultant, and educator, Awet Andemicael works primarily in the areas of music and theology. As a concert and operatic soprano, she has sung at festivals and concert venues across North America, Europe, and Japan. She has received music awards from numerous organizations, including the Metropolitan Opera National Council and the Oratorio Society of New York. Her current theological work focuses on the intersection of divine glory and human transformation, for which she received a 2015 Karl Schlecht Foundation Stipend to spend several months as a researcher in South Africa, based at the University of Stellenbosch. She has also written and served as a consultant on music and theology, refugee studies, and interfaith engagement, including involvement in scholarly working groups, membership in the Jerusalem-based Elijah Interfaith Institute Academy, and an interview featured on Swedish public television. Publications include essays in the journal Worship; The Christian Century; the Oxford Refugee Studies Centre’s Forced Migration Review; and KANERE, a refugee-run independent news magazine based in Kakuma, Kenya. Her research study, Positive Energy: A Review of the Role of Artistic Activities in Refugee Camps, was published by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in 2011. More recently, she authored a chapter on Christian identity and interfaith engagement in “For Such a Time as This: Young Adults on the Future of the Church” (Judson Press, 2014). Committed to education and mentoring, she has taught courses on music and worship and theologies of reconciliation at the Université Chrétienne Bilingue du Congo in Beni and has led vocal master classes in Brittany, France, and at the University of Notre Dame. She also leads workshops on singing and Christian spirituality.
A.B. cum laude, Harvard University; M.F.A. University of California, Irvine; M.A.R., summa cum laude, Yale University; Certificate, Yale Institute of Sacred Music