Turkish mezzo-soprano and music scholar Lori Şen is known for her versatility in many vocal genres, including opera, art song, musical theatre, and jazz, as well as for her teaching and research interests in vocal literature, voice pedagogy, and voice science. She regularly collaborates with musicians and composers across a variety of genres, and has performed in Turkey, Europe, and the United States. Şen’s performances include solo recitals, jazz performances, Angelina/La Cenerentola with Opera NOVA, and she was featured as the alto soloist in the Mozart Requiem performance of the Symphony Orchestra of Northern Virginia (SONOVA).

Şen completed her Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Voice Performance at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her dissertation, Sephardic Art Song: A Musical Legacy of the Sephardic Disapora, explored the Sephardic Art Song repertoire from the Western classical perspective. Over the past year, she has introduced this repertoire to audiences through solo recitals, in addition to her lectures on the history, language, and culture of the Sephardim, and elements and stylistic features of Sephardic music. She presented her research at the 14th Barcelona Festival of Song in Barcelona, Spain, the 8th Annual Judeo-Spanish Symposium (UCLAdino) at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Yunus Emre Institute and the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, both in Washington, D.C.

Şen received her Master of Music in Voice Performance and Pedagogy at Westminster Choir College, in Princeton, NJ, as a Fulbright grantee. She also holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics from the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey, in addition to a Bachelor of Music degree in Voice and a Master of Education degree in Physics Education from Dokuz Eylül University in Izmir, Turkey.