Meg Freeman Whalen

Before joining the College of Arts + Architecture, Meg Freeman Whalen served as the Director of Public Relations and Community Engagement for the Charlotte Symphony, following a career as a freelance music and dance writer for the Charlotte Observer, Charlotte Viewpoint, and Classical Voice North Carolina and as the arts editor for Charlotte magazine. She also taught in the music department at Queens University of Charlotte from 1994 to 2013, where her courses included Music in America, Film Music, Music Appreciation, Music in Society, From Jazz to Rock and Roll, and Women in Music.

Meg is the author of a short history of the Charlotte Symphony Orchestra, The Sound of Charlotte: The First 75 Years of the Charlotte Symphony, and contributed the Foreword for North Carolina Musicians: Photographs and Conversations by Daniel Coston (McFarland Press, 2013).  She has presented papers at regional and national conferences of the College Music Society, the North Carolina Association of Historians, the Society for American Music, the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, and the Americans for the Arts National Convention and has published in scholarly journals such as the Journal of the Conductors’ Guild, the Journal of the North Carolina Association of Historians, and Women of Note. 

Meg serves on the Board of Directors for Movement Migration and A Sign of the Times of the Carolinas and is on the Cultural Master Plan Steering Committee for the City of Charlotte. She is a founder of Arts Impact Charlotte, a local initiative committed to understanding how the arts and design address issues of justice, equity, mobility, and well-being in Charlotte. In conjunction with that effort, she has served as a co-principal investigator on research projects funded by the Gambrell Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Meg holds a Bachelor of Music in Piano Performance and an Bachelor of Arts in English from Queens University of Charlotte and a Master of Music in Piano Performance from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.