Heather MacLaughlin Garbes received her Doctorate of Musical Arts degree at the University of Washington. While at UW, she helped to develop and maintain the UW Baltic Choral Library, the first collection of its kind in the United States. This research has allowed her to present at College Music Society’s National (2007, 2009, 2010, 2012) and International Conferences (2009, 2011, 2013), the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies International Conference, the Baltic Musics and Musicology Conference in Canterbury, England, The Latvian Archive, Library and Material Culture Conference at the Library of Congress and other regional conferences. Her research was recently published in the chapter “Baltic Languages: Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian” in the book The Use of the International Phonetic Alphabet in the Choral Rehearsal (Scarecrow Press, 2012), a collaborative effort with Dr. Duane Karna and Andrew Schmidt. She has conducted numerous collegiate and community ensembles in the Seattle, Chicago and Houston areas and was guest clinician for the Bangkok International Choral Festival as well as an artist-in-residence for the Bangkok International Schools. She is currently the Founder and Artistic Director of the Mägi Ensemble, a ten voice professional women’s ensemble that works to perform and record compositions from the Baltic region that are rarely heard outside of that area and to be an ambassador of the power of music in inter-cultural dialogue and identity. Dr. MacLaughlin Garbes continues to work with the Baltic Studies Program and the Baltic Choral Library at the University of Washington and has worked at Lake Forest College and The Shepherd School of Music at Rice University.