Sara Salloum
Dr Sara Salloum is a Renaissance lute player and scholar who reenacts the performances of musicians – particularly women – from sixteenth and seventeenth-century Europe. She has performed in diverse settings including historic houses and castles, cathedrals, galleries and museums, opera houses and concert halls, cafés and bars. Her PhD brought her skills as a performing musician together with scholarship, and developed fresh and original methods for conducting historical and musical research.
Sara’s passion for the lute developed through her childhood love of the classical guitar, which she treasured through an upbringing which involved an extraordinary amount of change. Of mixed Ukrainian and Lebanese heritage, Sara had experienced life in three different continents even before her sixth birthday, living in cities including London, Beirut, and Auckland, New Zealand. A childhood that involved many different schools as her family moved between continents saw her secondary education conclude at a specialist music school in the north of Scotland.
When she moved from the guitar Sara became the Royal Northern College of Music’s first lute student, and began her studies with the internationally renowned lutenist Jacob Heringman. She also completed music degrees at the Universities of Manchester and Oxford, before a doctorate at Durham. Her research explores the rich culture of women’s lute playing in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, including how women’s clothing in the period influenced performance and how musical accomplishment shaped young women’s lives.
Sara now lives in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where she applies her musicianship and scholarship to a broad range of projects including performance, university lecturing, and lute teaching, and she enjoys enrichening connections with fellow musicians and scholars.
