Katharina Mueller is a writer and musician,
whose work centers emotional narrative
and explore the relationships between
humans, humanity, and non-human nature.
| Katharina owes the start of her music composition life to the Vermont Music-Comp program, which created the opportunity for her first major commission, “Tongues of Fire,” premiered by Dr. Jaime Laredo and the Vermont Symphony Orchestra at the Vermont Statehouse (2020). | ||
| Katharina has since been commissioned by several youth orchestras and ensembles, including the Green Mountain Youth Symphony, the Vermont Youth Orchestra, the Advanced Tour Group of the Upper Valley Music Center in Lebanon, NH, and the North Ohio Youth Orchestra, for which she was the Arlene & Larry Dunn Composer-In-Residence for 2022-2023. | ||
| She is an alumnus of the Yellow Barn Young Artists Program, and has continued to write commissioned work for Yellow Barn friends. Katharina has had several major premiers at Oberlin Conservatory, including The Crane’s Sigh, premiered by cello soloist Miles Reed (Oberlin 25’), Dr. Timothy Weiss and the Oberlin Sinfonietta (2024), | ||
| Elements premiered by the Raphael Jiménez and the Oberlin Orchestra (2025) and | ||
| Planet premiered by vocal soloist Ava Paul (Oberlin 26’), Dr. Timothy Weiss and the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble (2026). | ||
| She has also worked at Oberlin as a peer tutor in both music theory and aural skills, as a research assistant and special collections assistant at the Oberlin Conservatory Library, and as a performing violinist, including for the album studio recording of the mandolin concerto Tunebook by Dr. Jesse Jones, performed by Jacob Jolliff (2025). | ||
| Katharina recently received her BM in Music Composition at Oberlin Conservatory, having studied with Dr. Jesse Jones and Dr. Stephen Hartke. | ||
| Upon graduation, she was awarded a performance in Oberlin’s Danenberg Honors recital, was accepted into the Theta chapter of Pi Kappa Lambda, received third prize for the Cleveland Composers Guild 13th Annual Collegiate Competition, | . | |
| and received a Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. |
| Katharina is a practicing writer of fiction and non-fiction, a playwright, and a poet. | ||
| Interests that feed into her creative work include linguistics, rhetoric, and the musicality of language, psychology, queerness, and the physics and chemistry of our world, | ||
| all as inroads to conversations around social and environmental justice. | ||
| Her interests in myths and folktales, language and translation, and historical knowledge systems are reflected in her recent research assistantship with Oberlin professor Wendy Beth Hyman, a scholar of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century intellectual history. | ||
| Katharina’s first publication was an allegory of generational anthropogenic destruction called “If Only He Had Known,” accepted by a local newspaper in her junior year of high school. | ||
| Since then, Katharina has continued to make small publications, the most recent of her poem “Like How You Love” in The Examined Life Journal at the University of Iowa (2025). | ||
| Her gratitude extends with heart to the Creative Writing faculty at Oberlin College for the recognition awarded by the Diane Vreuls Prize in Prose Writing. | ||
| Katharina recently received her BA in Creative Writing at Oberlin College. | ||
As an undergraduate, Katharina also worked
as trained facilitator at the Oberlin Barefoot
Sustained Dialogue program, leading cross-
demographic conversations on environmental
justice, and was a finalist for a 2026 Watson
Fellowship in this area. She now holds a full-
time position as the coordinator of the program.
Outside of work (and beyond her own creative
work) she enjoys inordinate reading, playing
violin, hiking, camping, cooking from scratch,
and befriending stray cats.