Sara Ballance is a music educator and musicologist based in Pasadena, California. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she was the recipient of the Stanley Krebs Memorial Prize in Musicology. Her dissertation, titled Learning to Listen: Musical Hearing and the Construction of Musicality in the Nineteenth Century, was supported by a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, a Humanities and Social Sciences Research Grant from UCSB, and a Siff Family Educational Foundation graduate fellowship. She has presented research at national meetings of the Society for American Music and the American Musicological Society, as well as numerous other conferences. In addition to her work in musicology, Sara also holds degrees in Violin Performance and Pedagogy of Music Theory from the Eastman School of Music, and a degree in Brain & Cognitive Sciences from the University of Rochester. She currently teaches multiple levels of music theory, musicianship, performance, and music history.