Center Director and Registered Music Together^® Teacher
Amy Despres is the founder and director of Miss Amy's Music Makers, an early childhood music development program centered in Washington, DC. Amy has been singing and acting her entire life and is passionate about teaching and sharing music with young children and the community at large. Amy received her B.A.in vocal music and theatre from the University of Miami in 2002 and has since performed in numerous musicals and shows throughout the United States. Since living in Washington, Amy has sung with the Washington National Chorus, been a featured Washington Nationals national anthem singer, recorded several voice overs and commercials for local businesses and is a lead vocalist in the live bands Motorcade and Diplomatic Immunity. She completed her training with the Center for Music and Young Children in 2005 and began teaching with Music Together of Vienna and Little Steps Music in Washington DC. After two years of teaching, Amy discovered that her own neighborhood of Adams Morgan and Dupont Circle did not offer Music Together classes so she created Miss Amy's Music Makers in 2007 to bring The Joy of Family Music^® making to the Adams Morgan and Dupont communities. Amy has two little music makers in her family, Penelope and Holden who also enjoy coming to class!

The first instrument that I learned to play was the piano.  I practiced enough to get by and learn the basics, but didn't really fall in love with music until I started playing clarinet.  I got a scholarship to play clarinet in college and studied music.  I knew that I didn't want to be a professional musician, however, so I studied Education and Spanish as well.  I decided that I wanted to become a Spanish immersion teacher and moved to Spain as a Fulbright Scholar.  After living in Spain for 3 years, I felt that it was time to move back to the US and found a teaching job in the DC area.  I taught 4th grade Spanish immersion for 8 years, met my husband, and settled in NW DC.  I continue to play clarinet with the Fairfax County Wind Symphony.  

Katherine Clifton discovered her love of musical theatre at age 8 and sang, danced, and acted through grad school. She majored in English and minored in Theatre at Princeton University, and received Masters degrees from the University of Oxford in Refugee Studies and Public Policy. During gap years and summers, she taught English to young learners in Serbia, Japan, Jordan, and England (working with refugee youth), always incorporating music. Currently, she is the Assistant Director of Communications for Migration & Refugee Services at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. She became enchanted by the Music Together program while taking Miss Amy's class with her toddler, and she's delighted to start teaching and making music together!

Linda Steele

A family—possibly multilingual or multicultural—wants a music experience that feels welcoming across backgrounds and honors musical quality without being performance-focused. They may associate music with audiences and stages rather than participation.

Linda has been singing since she was three. She has toured internationally, performs in five languages, and won Taiwan’s Top Idol in 2006. She knows what it means to connect with a room through music. But a stage is not a circle. She discovered Music Together with her own daughters and found something her performing career hadn’t prepared her for: making music with her children rather than for an audience.

“On stage, the music goes one direction. In the circle, it moves between everyone. When I saw my own children light up because we were singing together—not because I was performing—I understood what this was really about.”

In her classes, her voice and musicality are unmistakable, but she directs them outward to lift the room, not lead it. Parents sing more boldly because she makes it feel safe to try. Without that, the family stays in the audience and music remains something experts perform. With it, the child grows up hearing music as something their family makes.