Professor, Performer, Content Creator: Meet Cal Performances’ Social Media & Digital Content Specialist

“One of the big through lines with performing, teaching, and socials, is that it is really all performance to me.”

By Krista Thomas, Cal Performances’ Associate Director of Communications

Tiffany Valvo has been an invaluable member of Cal Performances’ Marketing & Communications team since early 2022. And while you may not recognize her name, you have definitely seen her work, and perhaps even heard her voice in  videos! As Social Media & Digital Content Specialist, Valvo creates all the engaging content you see on our social media platforms, produces videos on our Beyond the Stage blog, supports with email graphics and advertising designs, and has even been a key figure in bringing student receptions to life! While her role at Cal Performances is in the digital marketing realm, Valvo has had a number of roles in the performing arts space, including professor, performer, podcaster, blogger, and creator of a very successful digital learning platform for clarinetists. In this article, we dive into her background and how all of her experiences have built on one another to create a holistic approach to engaging with and exciting others about the performing arts.

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From a young age, Tiffany Valvo felt an incredible draw to music. “My mom definitely sang a lot to us when I was growing up, and I had an aunt who started giving me piano lessons in kindergarten. My paternal grandfather was constantly listening to opera and classical music, and I would sit and listen for hours, too. But one of my earliest musical memories is actually how much I loved singing in Sunday school at church,” she recounted. Her love of music led her to join elementary school choir. But it was in middle school that she truly found her instrument.

Valvo playing the piano with her grandfather.

She joined middle school band in order to learn the clarinet, an instrument she’d heard her cousin play and been very taken by. (She also joined middle school orchestra and learned to play the violin, but admittedly this was only to get out of her school’s PE class!)

“I’d always loved listening to music, but I was especially curious about the sounds people could make when they came together. I liked school and the idea of practicing something specific, having a specific role, but then putting my part together with a big group of people to make something that sounded so much different than what I could make alone. It was the process of making music in community that was really captivating,” she said.

Throughout the rest of her pre-college years, Valvo would invest countless hours into her clarinet between marching band, school orchestra, private lessons, a local youth orchestra, and participating in both the Brevard Music Festival and the Boston University Tanglewood Institute. Valvo pursued a performance degree at Florida State University (FSU) for undergrad, and won her first professional symphony job with the Tallahassee Symphony Orchestra when she was only a junior in college.

Valvo in her high school band uniform.

“Growing up, I wanted to be a teacher. But at the time that I was entering college, I didn’t really understand that there could be a way for me to cohesively link being a teacher and being a musician without working as a high school or middle school band director. So, I continued to pursue performance.”

It wasn’t until her later years at FSU and into her masters program at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York that she began to look around at the incredible professors and consider that this might be a way to combine her love of educating with her love of playing music at an advanced level. Throughout her time in undergrad, her master’s program, and even during her doctoral program at Eastman, Valvo packed her schedule with her studies, school ensemble performances, professional gigs with established ensembles and orchestras, and teaching roles.

“In my second year at Eastman, I was a teaching assistant and taught a class to music education majors, who are required to learn a little about each instrument. I also taught private lessons to students at the University of Rochester, and was always taking in private students on the side. The last two years of my doctorate, I accepted an instructor role at Nazareth College and taught three sections of an aural skills class Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at 8AM, 9AM, and 10AM. I went on to teach more music theory there, and eventually also taught music theory at Syracuse University,” she said. “Those few years were incredibly intense because there was so much work between practicing my instrument, performing for required school ensembles and professional groups, teaching, and studying for exams. But it truly built up resilience.”

Valvo teaches a master class.

For Valvo, while pursuing so many engagements at once could be tiring, it was energizing at the same time; it felt impossible to give up any one path in favor of another. “I truly loved everything I was doing. Pursuing multiple avenues within the arts was nourishing on so many levels, and I felt like everything was additive to itself, with each avenue enriching my experience of the other.”

After graduating with a DMA in Clarinet Performance, a minor in pedagogy, and an Arts Leadership Certificate, Valvo found near-immediate employment as a clarinet professor at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), where she drew on her own multifaceted experience to enrich the experience of her students. “By the time I got to VCU, I was particularly interested in teaching not only the instrument itself, but also how to develop self-efficacy to succeed. During the years I taught previously, I’d encountered many students who were really talented, but they weren’t getting support in forming strong habits, in how to address self-doubt, all these things that are so important for creative people to learn to deal with in a variety of pursuits.”

In response to this gap, Valvo conceived of a class she called The Creative Habit after a book by Twyla Tharp (a featured creator on Cal Performances’ 2024–25 season!). “Being a clarinetist feels so personal, so central to your identity, particularly as you’re in school. I felt it was important to talk about things like forming healthy habits, managing stress, developing confidence in your art—all these things that made me who I was as a professional and that had supported me in all of my artistic pursuits.” She also started a blog and podcast to reach more students about these topics.

Valvo performs Mahler on clarinet with the Richmond Symphony.

While still performing frequently with the Richmond Symphony and with various chamber groups around the country, plus teaching at VCU, Valvo sat on a marketing committee for the university and was eventually asked to take over the Department of Music’s social media presence. She has gained a handful of digital content skills when starting her blog and podcast, so decided to accept. Never one to shy away from a challenge, Valvo continued to develop a wide array of digital skills through a combination of “a lot of Googling” and taking a sampling of classes in digital creation and copywriting on the side; then evaluating her impact and iterating on what she’d done in the past. While the world of digital creation might seem like a significant departure from her experience performing and teaching, for Valvo, they had clear synergy.

“One of the big through lines with performing, teaching, and socials, is that it is really all performance to me. It all involves an intense creative process, whether practicing to learn a piece, or trying to come up with a creative way to teach someone effectively, or developing content to get someone to understand how incredible a certain performer is… It’s all based in a lot of individual reflection and working on a process so intimately and intricately, and then bringing all that work in front of your core audience and seeing how it lands. When someone gives you feedback that what you’ve thought up or performed impacted them in some way, that’s really the cherry on top,” she said.

In 2020, Valvo expanded her digital experience and impact exponentially when she co-created the Digital Clarinet Academy (DCA), an online teaching platform to reach advanced level clarinet students who lacked in-person instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic. She and her cofounder developed many resources that touched on specific performance skills as well as the soft skills and personal development students needed to succeed. As part of this work, they hosted and taught 200 events, including masterclasses and workshops with over 50 of the leading clarinetists around the world that would reach hundreds if not thousands of students during Valvo’s nearly four years with DCA. While her work at DCA was incredibly time intensive on top of her other roles, “to be able to give people that kind of access and know how valuable it was for them really kept me going,” she said.

In the winter of 2021, Valvo began to transition out of her professorship at VCU due to her family’s relocation to the Bay Area. “I had every possible higher ed alert on for California when I knew we were moving, but I also knew there wasn’t a full time clarinet professor role where we were headed, and I would have to make something work. I saw Cal Performances’ opening for Social Media & Digital Content Specialist and initially shrugged it off because I had thought of myself professionally more so as a professor and educator,” she shared. “But after a short while, I reflected on the digital content skill set I’d developed, particularly in the three years prior, and realized that I had something valuable to contribute. It felt like an opportunity to impact the field of performing arts in a different way than I had previously.”

Valvo with her computer.

While she didn’t know how she would feel working full time in a marketing role, she remained open and committed to sharing her unique perspective in this new context. In the few years that Valvo has been with the organization, she has inspired the entire Marketing & Communications team with her creativity, initiative, and thoughtful understanding of how to reach and excite others, be they students or potential patrons. Notably, she has developed many engaging videos for our Beyond the Stage blog, including educational videos that draw on her background to break down music concepts for the general public; she has expanded the number of social media platforms Cal Performances manages and grown those platforms by thousands; she has established incredible collaborations with both Cal Performances colleagues and artists; and she has been a key proponent of initiatives both with students and with the general public that aim to make the performing arts less intimidating and more accessible and inviting.

“At Cal Performances, what I love is that I’m constantly stimulated by so many amazing performances, and I feel like it’s a constant challenge to figure out a creative way to talk about each one. Also, I really love working with a larger team of people who have more of a background directly in marketing and learning from them. And I love that we are all able to come together to share different perspectives on the arts,” she said. “This role has opened my eyes to a very different side of the performing arts industry and has given me the opportunity to stretch myself to find new ways of getting people invested in the performing arts.”

Unsurprisingly, she has also continued to nourish her multifaceted interests by taking occasional performance gigs, consulting, leading a social media cohort to discuss hot topics in the field amongst other arts organizations, and teaching part time at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where she draws on her work at Cal Performances for her classes that teach students how to build and expand their digital presence.

“I’m teaching in a different capacity now, with my classes more focused on digital marketing. Not many music professors are close enough to the marketing side of things to know how to communicate with students just how valuable those skills are in today’s world, and so I’m grateful that I have the opportunity to share my own experience in the digital sphere and all my own examples to help students learn how to promote themselves in a very concrete, evidence-based way,” Valvo said. “It’s yet another example of how the work I’m doing on all these different fronts is feeding into itself and enriching what I am doing in every other dimension. My work at Cal Performances has truly become foundational to all my other work.”

In reflecting on her own journey with the performing arts, and how she sees her professional life unfolding, Valvo shared, “No matter if I’m playing or teaching or doing digital content, my goal is always to get people excited about the performing arts—about clarinet, about music theory, about the many incredible performers that cross our stages. Overall, what I’ve learned is that there’s way more in common about doing those things than there is difference.”

Make sure to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, X, TikTok, and LinkedIn to see Tiffany’s stellar work.