#4: Mary-Kathryn Stevens-Toffin, Violist

I’ve known Mary-Kathryn for awhile; she and my husband were colleagues at the New World Symphony, a training academy for aspiring orchestral musicians in Miami, Florida. Training to become a professional classical musician is a lifelong pursuit. Mixing motherhood and career has not always been the norm for professional classical musicians. In fact, it’s also only been in the last 50 or 60 years that women have even held jobs in professional orchestras. This is one of the reasons I started this project in the first place. In my classical music training, I saw very few female professionals who also had children. Now with our generation, it’s becoming much more common. Mary-Kathryn Stevens-Toffin is not only a successful violist in a major orchestra, she’s raising two kids with her husband Olivier, and running an Etsy shop on top of it all.