Canadian clarinetist Jana Starling is a nationally and internationally active performer and teacher. She has performed with the Arizona Opera Company, the Paraguayan National Symphony, and utility clarinet with the Phoenix Symphony Orchestra and ProMusica Chamber Orchestra. She has been programmed numerous times at the International Clarinet Association’s ClarinetFest®, given recitals and masterclasses at the Belgian Clarinet Academy, Sichuan Conservatory of Music in China, and has been a guest artist and adjudicator at various festivals in the United States and Canada. She has also teaches frequently at the International Music Camp (Peace Gardens, CAN/USA), the Interprovincial Music Camp (ON), and the co-founder of the Lift Clarinet Academy, an innovative summer program in Colorado.

Starling has recorded and commissioned new music by composers such as Eric Mandat, William O. Smith, James David, and Roshanne Etezady. Her debut CD Inflexion earned a 2007 East Coast Music Award nomination for “Classical Recording of the Year” and her second solo CD Mythos (PotenzaMusic, 2011) contains numerous premiere recording by composers such as Theresa Martin, Dana Wilson and Mark Schultz. She has been involved in numerous collaborative recordings and currently tours and commissions works with the clarinet trio, Ironwood Trio, playing Eb clarinet. The Clarinet magazine (Mar 2008) CD review hails Starling as “a wonderful player….musically sensitive…. , you will not be disappointed!”.

In 2011, she joined the Don Wright Faculty of Music at Western University as Assistant Professor. She previously held positions at Arizona State University (USA) and Mount Allison University (NB, Canada). Starling received her BMus in music education from Brandon University (Manitoba, Canada, 1995) and her MMus and DMA in clarinet performance from Arizona State University (USA, 1997, 2005). Her teachers have been Ron Goddard, Connie Gitlin, and Robert Spring.