The emerging academic profile presented on this website, together with my musical and teaching work, forms part of a broader professional trajectory that includes many years outside these fields. These three strands of my professional work: musician, educator, and scholar, developed in this chronological order. 

 First, approaching my thirties, I enrolled in a one-year guitar course at the Musicians Institute in London. Coming from more than a decade of sustained work in hands-on occupations, I entered formal music training not with the ambition of pursuing a professional career, but to fulfil a long-held aspiration deferred since childhood. 

Nevertheless, my engagement with the instrument developed beyond my initial expectations, leading to the award of a Platinum Certificate upon graduation among a large and skilled international cohort. Because of this, I was encouraged to consider continuing into undergraduate music studies. 

This transition was made possible both by my prior working experience, which allowed me to support my studies through work, and by the UK higher education system’s recognition of mature learners and non-linear educational trajectories, where commitment and demonstrated practice are afforded academic legitimacy. 

Upon completion, in my mid-thirties,  of my undergraduate degree, I embarked on a full-time performing career, which over the following years led me to work alongside and measure myself against established session musicians in a range of demanding professional contexts. 

As my experience as a performer grew, I gradually began to gravitate toward teaching. Although my teaching practice developed only after years of performance experience, the vocation to teach lay beneath — shaped by my memories of wanting to learn as a young person, which in turn sharpened my attunement to other students’ will to learn. In this sense, experience did not plant the seeds of this vocation; it authorised them to flourish. 

In my early forties, I began my teaching practice by founding a guitar studio in the private sector, which was the viable option given my professional experience and qualifications. At the same time, in order to ground my pedagogical development in educational theory, I undertook a master’s degree in music education. During this phase, I inhabited a hybrid position: simultaneously an academic student within institutional settings and a teacher operating in a community-based context. This dual perspective laid the foundation for my educational outlook. 

This transition from performer to guitar educator marked a major shift in my professional life. For the first time, I was no longer moving between unrelated occupations in sectors such as food service, cleaning, or printing. Instead, my experiences ceased to run in parallel and began to coil around a single centre: music. At the same time, earlier working experiences proved foundational, providing adaptability, a strong work ethic, organisational instinct, and managerial skills that converged within this new creative and educational enterprise. 

My guitar studio soon served as a model for other teachers in the area seeking certification pathways, culminating in the provision of curricular guidance to teaching staff across approximately seventy music schools in Italy and Italian Switzerland, as well as the organisational framework and supervision for the delivery of thousands of examinations for music students, teachers, and professional musicians. 

During my graduate studies, I came to realise that their most enduring contribution to my development was not the accumulation of pedagogical knowledge alone, but my introduction to the research process itself. What began at master’s level evolved into a strong interest in the epistemological foundations of research and the ways knowledge is assembled through methodological rigour. This became a core intellectual pursuit in its own right and led me to undertake doctoral studies. 

This phase required a rebalancing of my professional priorities. Teaching activity was selectively reduced, and performance practice moved to the background in order to create the intellectual space necessary to develop my research capacities alongside part-time study. Rather than representing a departure from music-making and guitar practice, this period constituted an investment in the formation of a three-part professional identity, in which research, performance, and teaching complement and inform one another. 

My background as a performer and my cross-cultural experience have enabled me to engage meaningfully with a broad range of research participants and working contexts during fieldwork. At the same time, my own learning trajectory across informal and formal settings has forged the standpoint from which emerged my examination of the complementarities between these learning domains. 

My experience across multiple musical traditions has sharpened my attention to how they are framed in academic discourse. During my training, I encountered music genres as siloed and hierarchical territories. My practical experience, however, questioned this perception, and my research enquiry enabled me to situate these genres within the broader Afro-Atlantic musical tradition. In doing so, I emphasise their co-influences and the historical origins that unite them. 

Hence, my research stems from questions that arise in real-world practice; academic research provides the tools to address them through systematic analysis. Working across different professions and communities has shaped my positionality. From this standpoint, I view knowledge as situated and I acknowledge that understanding is always provisional, which leads me to remain open to alternative perspectives in order to foster my scholarly growth. 

Over time, guitar practice, research, and teaching have woven together to form an integrated whole, rather than independent professional trajectories. In this view, guitar playing marked the point of departure for my journey that lead me into different musical worlds, while research has provided me the conceptual and methodological lenses through which I make sense of these worlds. Finally, teaching follows organically as the conduit through which this knowledge is shared with others. 

This background naturally drives my interest in educational environments that value inquiry, global perspectives, and interdisciplinarity. Such educational settings would allow me to apply all facets of the knowledge I have accumulated in my professional arc. In particular, I aim to contribute to music learning within higher education contexts – where performance, pedagogy, and research can effectively inform one another. 

Moreover, I am prepared to conduct research projects for institutional bodies and to disseminate findings through presentations and publications. 

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