Shianne Bonham is an oboist who earned her Bachelor of Music in Oboe Performance from Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music, where she concentrated in classical music with a particular interest in modern repertoire. She studied with Dr. Jennifer Potochnic from 2014 to 2021 and continued her studies under Dr. Jared Hauser beginning in 2021 at the Blair School of Music. During her undergraduate career, Shianne received extensive training on oboe, English horn, oboe d’amore, and piano through private instruction, chamber music, recordings, and large ensemble performance. She held principal oboe positions in both the Vanderbilt University Orchestra and the Vanderbilt Wind Symphony.

Throughout her studies, Shianne engaged deeply with a wide range of oboe repertoire in both ensemble and solo settings. Reflecting the Blair School of Music’s commitment to expanding and reexamining the Western canon, her repertoire includes standard works such as Mozart’s Oboe Quartet in F Major, Britten’s Six Metamorphoses after Ovid, and Schumann’s Three Romances for Oboe and Piano, alongside contemporary compositions. In the spring of 2023, she performed Voyage of Life, a quartet for solo oboe and string trio. In fall 2024, she served as principal oboist for the Blair School of Music’s “Florence Price: A Celebration,” performing in Price’s Piano Concerto in D minor and Ethiopia’s Shadow in America.

In addition to her performance work, Shianne was appointed as a course assistant in the Musicology and Ethnomusicology program in fall 2022 under Dr. Robert Fry. That same year, she was selected as a fellow for the project The Diverse World of Yusef A. Lateef: From Archives to Performance, a collaborative fellowship between the Blair School of Music, Vanderbilt Special Collections and University Archives, the National Museum of African American Music, and the Buchanan Library Fellowship Program.

Shianne has also been an active participant in the Blair School of Music’s “Banding Together” initiative, which promotes cultural exchange through the concert band experience. Through this program, she has traveled to Santa Rosa de Osos, Colombia to perform with the Banda Sinfónica de las Américas; to Havana, Cuba with La Orquesta CubanoAmericana de Vientos as part of an unprecedented partnership between the U.S. Embassy and the Instituto Cubano de la Música; and to the Dominican Republic in summer 2024 to participate in Festi-Band República Dominicana.

When not immersed in music, Shianne can often be found making reeds or tending to her ever-growing collection of plants.

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