A native of Michigan’s upper peninsula, Stephanie Gregoire is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Music Education at the University of Illinois Chicago. Stephanie moved to Chicago in 2014 and has over a decade of choral teaching experience in city schools, working as a conductor for Uniting Voices Chicago (formerly Chicago Children’s Choir). Throughout her tenure at Uniting Voices, she worked primarily in the Hyde Park, Woodlawn, and Bronzeville neighborhoods, serving as an in-school conductor and co-director of the Hyde Park Neighborhood Choir program. In 2022, she spearheaded the Prelude Choir program at Uniting Voices Chicago, which provides beginning level vocal instruction and literacy for first and second grade students. Stephanie also serves as co-founder and director of the Evanston Folk Choir, a non-auditioned community choir focusing on learning a diverse array of folk music in the oral tradition. She keeps an active guest conducting profile, most recently conducting the South Dakota Junior SSA State Honors Choir in January 2025.
Stephanie’s research centers three core areas of music education: gender and sexual identity, singing for childhood well-being, and world music pedagogy. Collectively, she addresses how singing together influences individual identity, community cultivation, and a sense of belonging and wellbeing within diverse musical spaces. Her scholarly work has been published in The Choral Journal and The SAGE Handbook of School Music Education, and she has presented at academic conferences in the United States, Finland, England, and Mexico. In 2024, Stephanie was awarded the Graduate Student Research Grant for her dissertation Where Do I Belong: Perceptions of Community and Belonging in Choirs that Coalesce Around Non-Musical Identity at Northwestern University.
She is currently the lead musical facilitator and trainer on an international research project called the Music for Childhood Wellbeing Initiative, which was established with a quarter million-dollar grant from Northwestern’s Buffett Institute for Global Affairs in 2021. The goal is to provide a robust body of data supporting the notion that singing together has a measurable impact on child health and well-being across diverse cultural contexts. A facet of this work includes the Fontan Choir, a collaboration with members of the cardiovascular research team at Lurie Children’s hospital. As the musical facilitator, Stephanie works with students who have undergone the Fontan heart procedure on a combination of breathing exercises and group singing which aim to improve lung function, breath control, and provide a sense of group belonging for Fontan patients.
Stephanie holds a Bachelor of Music in Music Education (Western Michigan University), a Master of Music in Music Education (Northwestern University), and a Doctor of Philosophy in Music Education (Northwestern University). When not making music, Stephanie loves playing ice hockey with the Evanston Tigers Women’s Hockey Club!