Joanne Bozeman

Joanne Hayes Bozeman spent her early years in a Midwestern home filled with music, song and dance. Her family relocated to Arizona, where she first began voice training. She went on to complete a degree in voice performance from the University of Arizona.  Her teachers include Eugene T. Conley, Richard Miller, Bruce Lunkley and Teresa Seidl.

Joanne began giving singing lessons when she was in college, and her teaching career spans nearly 50 years. While her three children were young, she performed and maintained a community-based studio. In 1993, she joined the voice faculty at Lawrence University’s Conservatory of Music from which she retired in 2019. She continues to teach a small private studio, working with singers from grade school age through mature adults.  As a classically trained soprano, Joanne was a frequent performer in a broad range of recital, oratorio, operatic, musical theater and chamber music, often performing with her husband, tenor Kenneth Bozeman. Her solo engagements include performances with the Fox Valley Symphony, the Green Lake Music Festival, the Rockford Bach Chamber Choir and the Lawrence University Concert Choir and Orchestra. She performed on Wisconsin Public Radio's Sunday Afternoon Live at the Elvehjem, and as resident soprano at Music in the Mountains, a summer festival in Colorado. For many years, she served as a church soloist and section leader, and she performed with the Orpheus Vocal Consort, a professional vocal quartet.  

In addition to studio voice in the university setting, Joanne taught supporting courses including lyric dictions, basic voice science and acoustics, classical voice "culture", and class voice and singing pedagogy for the general music educators. She is pleased that many of her students have gone on to select graduate programs, young artist programs and singing careers; others hold positions as music educators, university-based voice teachers, and some have established careers as speech-language pathologists/singing voice specialists. Joanne is equally satisfied that many students have chosen other life paths, prepared by their study of voice and music. 

Joanne has had a longstanding interest in voice health, vocology and the effects of hormones on the female lifespan (adolescence, the menstrual cycle, pregnancy and breastfeeding), particularly voice changes associated with the menopause transition. She served as voice trainer for the Lawrence Community Music School Girl Choir, working with a select chorus of young women in the midst of adolescent voice maturation, and at Lawrence, she taught general and choral music educators about adolescent voice change. These interests formed the groundwork for her fascination with all the hormonal, voice-related contexts. However, it was Joanne’s own journey through the menopause transition and related voice difficulties that spurred her quest to understand the effects of changing reproductive hormones on the singing voice.  Her experiences and research resulted in an article, “One Singer’s Experience with Perimenopause”, published in Classical Singer magazine in 2005. Collaborating with Nancy Bos and Cate Frazier-Neely, Joanne co-authored the influential Singing Through Change, a pivotal resource for women experiencing vocal shifts during midlife and beyond. It was released in 2020, and continues to garner attention and praise in the voice and voice care communities.

As a young mother, Joanne became an ASPO-Certified childbirth and prenatal educator, and helped expectant parents understand and prepare for the physical and emotional changes of pregnancy, childbirth and early parenthood. She enjoyed this role of health educator for ten years, which equipped her for future teaching about voice health and for educating and supporting female singers as they encounter interactions of the voice with various hormonal life contexts. These interests fuel her dedication to women's health advocacy and education, and continue to motivate her to advocate for specific, female-related voice research and voice health advice and care.  

Joanne is a member of the National Association of Teachers of Singing (NATS) and the Pan American Vocology Association (PAVA). She has presented numerous times on the topic of female hormones and voice for NATS, PAVA, the British Voice Association (BVA), the International Congress of Voice Teachers (ICVT), the Voice Foundation Chapters of Mexico and Georgia, the South and Central Florida Chapters of NATS, the Pan American Acoustic Symposium (PAS7+), and the Acoustic Vocal Pedagogy Workshop (New England Conservatory and University of Michigan). Joanne has also appeared on number of podcasts, presented at universities and voice teacher education groups, including the UK's Voice Study Center, the International Voice Teachers of Mix (IVTOM), BAST Training, and SingSing, and has provided course material for Vocal Health Education, also UK-based. With Cate Frazier-Neely and Nancy Bos, Joanne co-authored "Managing Perimenopausal and Menopausal Voice Changes" published in the Journal of Singing (2021) and she is a co-author of the chapter, "Characteristics of the Female Voice Across the Reproductive Lifespan: Educational and Healthcare Implications" in the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Voice Pedagogy.

Joanne has recently pursued a second pedagogy interest: teaching singers with hypermobility, Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome with hypermobility (h-EDS) and/or POTS (postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome). She has presented on these "invisible" diagnoses and their special implications for singers, teachers, conductors and stage directors. 

Joanne and her husband cherish their roles as grandparents, and they enjoy traveling and interacting with the voice community worldwide.