Meg Lanfear

Meg Lanfear is a violinist, Suzuki educator, teacher trainer, and the founder and director of the Oak Park String Academy (OPSA), just outside Chicago. For more than two decades, she has built a career that moves comfortably between the concert stage, the teaching studio, and the larger questions of how music education can evolve.

Meg is a tenured violinist with the Elgin Symphony Orchestra and has performed with artists including Itzhak Perlman, Herbie Hancock, and Diana Krall, among many others. Her training includes Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Violin Performance from the Cleveland Institute of Music, as well as a Master’s degree in Suzuki Pedagogy from CIM’s Sato Center for Suzuki Studies. In 2002, she spent three months studying at the Suzuki Talent Institute in Matsumoto, Japan. She was also one of the inaugural recipients of the Suzuki Association of the Americas’ Certificate of Achievement in 2010.

At OPSA, Meg has spent years developing a Suzuki program that combines individual lessons, group classes, and a strong sense of community for students and families throughout the Chicagoland area. She created OPSA’s Equitable Tuition Program, an effort to make high-quality Suzuki instruction more financially accessible while maintaining a sustainable model for teachers and the school. This work reflects a larger interest in rethinking how the Suzuki community can build greater accessibility into the future of the method without losing sight of musical and educational excellence.

Meg is a registered Suzuki teacher trainer with the Suzuki Association of the Americas and is increasingly involved in teacher development and conversations about the future of Suzuki education. She is particularly interested in the ways teachers can inherit the best of the Suzuki tradition while continuing to question, adapt, and expand the systems surrounding it.

Alongside teaching, performing, running a music school, and raising two children, Meg has pursued additional training in Dalcroze Eurhythmics, completing Levels 1A–3A with Jeremy Dittus at the Dalcroze School of Music.

She lives in Oak Park, Illinois, where she continues to teach, perform, train teachers, raise her two amazing sons, and think about what music education might look like next.