Violist Molly Wise joins the faculty of the University of Iowa School of Music as Visiting Assistant Professor of Viola in fall 2026. Before moving to Iowa, she was an active performer and teaching artist in Houston, Texas, working with organizations including Musiqa, Mercury Ensemble, ROCO, Kinetic Ensemble, DACAMERA of Houston, AFA-Texas, Opus 1, and more, in museums, concert halls, classrooms, and beyond. She has concertized around the U.S. and Canada as a chamber and solo artist, performing alongside colleagues and mentors including violist Milena Pajaro-van der Stadt, violinists Margaret Batjer and Jinjoo Cho, cellists Brinton Smith and Matthew Zalkind, and members of the Miró, New Orford, Arianna, and Borromeo Quartets.

 

A new music specialist, Professor Wise has participated in countless world-premiere performances and inter-disciplinary collaborations. Recent highlights include Theo Chandler’s “No One Owns the Current,” a string quartet with poetry by Houston’s Youth Poet Laureate Lucas Fang to honor Houston’s Vietnamese American community; “DECLARE,” a USA 250th-inspired performance piece presented by the Apollo Chamber Players, featuring composers including Emma Kent Wine and Jaylin Vinson and poetry by all six Houston Poet Laureates; a viola/piano commission by Houston-based composer Tian Qin entitled “NO ‘i think’ NO ‘sorry,’” a companion piece in response to Rebecca Clarke’s Viola Sonata; and “Mekong: SOUL,” a multimedia music and abstract narrative show by Vietnamese instrumentalist Võ Vân-Ánh, performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. and Asia Society in Houston.  Additionally, she was the violist in the premiere and recording of Anthony Brandt’s “Meeting of Minds,” winner of Chamber Music America’s 2025 Interdisciplinary Collaboration of the Year Award, available on Navona Records. This piece features live and pre-recorded string quartet, choreography by NobleMotion Dance, multimedia art by Badie Khaleghian, and live EEG brain-cap data from the University of Houston’s IUCRC BRAIN Center. She also performed in Kinetic Ensemble’s debut album, The Wilderness Anthology, comprising new works that explore the relationship of musical sound and the natural world by composers Nicky Sohn and Patrick Harlin.

 

Professor Wise is a passionate proponent of women in music. Through her recital programming and pedagogy, she showcases the excellence of musical women, historical and living, including through original transcriptions. She presented her arrangements of Florence Price’s Seven Descriptive Pieces and Amy Beach’s Romance Op. 23 at the 2024 American Viola Society Festival in Los Angeles, California; many more arrangements of works by Nadia and Lili Boulanger, Hildegard von Bingen, and more are available on her website: mollywiseviola.com. A major highlight of the 2026/27 season is her performance of Joan Tower’s viola concerto, “Purple Rhapsody,” with the University of Iowa Symphony Orchestra.

 

Professor Wise is a Doctor of Musical Arts candidate at Rice University, having served as James Dunham’s teaching assistant for five years. She holds a Master of Music degree from Rice and a Bachelor of Music from the Cleveland Institute of Music, where she studied with Jeffrey Irvine and Lynne Ramsey. She plays on a 1996 Michael Weller viola.