Kristen S. Hansen served as Associate Professor and Senior Lecturer of Music in the Schwob School of Music at Columbus State University (Georgia). She holds the DMA and the MM in Horn Performance and Literature from the Eastman School Music in Rochester, New York, and she previously received the degree Bachelor of Music summa cum laude from St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota.

Her teachers in horn have included Peter Kurau, Kendall Betts, and Verne Reynolds. After completing master’s coursework in Rochester, Dr. Hansen was the director of high school and middle school bands in the Fonda-Fultonville district in central New York. Concurrently, she played as assistant and then principal horn with the Schenectady Symphony Orchestra. She has taught and performed at the Kendall Betts Horn Camp and has appeared as a Regional Artist and a lecturer at annual conventions of the International Horn Society and the Southeast Horn Workshop.

She was a founding member of the Barry Tuckwell Institute and for ten years held the position of second horn with the Columbus Symphony Orchestra. With the CSU Horn Studio, she hosted the Southeast Horn Workshop twice, as well as the International Horn Competition of America. She served several times as a faculty member or site director for study abroad programs in Oxford, United Kingdom, and Paris, France, and in August 2010 performed with the Vianden Festival in Luxembourg.

She has authored an undergraduate theory text and teaches humanities courses for Columbus State, online. Dr. Hanse is the Minister in Music and Parish Administrator at First Evangelical Lutheran Church in Nashville and has led two performances of a “sing along” Messiah with Early Music City and community partners. She joins the Cumberland University faculty to teach music theory.