Kate Haughey

Executive Director

Kate Haughey is an ethnomusicologist and collaborative ethnographer who specializes in community-engaged and inclusive pedagogical and research approaches. She is the Executive Director of the Vermont Folklife Center in Middlebury, Vermont, and holds a PhD in Ethnomusicology from Brown University. Her research uses participatory ethnographic methods to interpret the cultural politics of music making and sustainability among refugee and displaced Indigenous communities. Kate’s dissertation focuses on the experiences of the Kirat Rai, one Indigenous group among the vibrant, multi-ethnic Bhutanese-Nepali refugee community resettled in Burlington, Vermont. Based on five years of collaborative fieldwork supported by the Vermont Folklife Center, Vermont Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts, Kate’s research tracks how Kirat refugees negotiate, perform and reckon with the categories of “heritage” and “traditional art” applied to them by a network of nonprofits, state institutions and federal arts agencies. Her work offers a window into the connections between music and traditional arts, wellbeing, and power.

For her master’s project at Brown University, Kate co-led a collaborative audio and video documentary project with Mbyá-Guaraní musicians in southern Brazil. Kate also has years of experience as an educator, having taught in both K-12 and higher education settings. She has additional years of experience teaching early childhood music and cello. Kate received a BA in Hispanic Studies and a BM in Cello Performance from Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, WA, and a MA in Ethnomusicology at Brown University in Providence, RI. She earned a certificate in Nonprofit Management from Marlboro College in 2016.