Meet Anna Diemer

About Me

Hi, my name is Anna (they/them), and I am a queer voice teacher based in Asheville, NC. I’ve been singing as long as I can remember, and according to my mom, I could sing the North Carolina fight song when I was two (go Tar Heels!) Since then, I’ve sung in choirs all over the country, studied art song and opera, and even started writing my own songs.

The first voice lesson I ever taught was in 2010 as a part of my voice pedagogy class at Furman, and I was hooked. In my previous eight years of studying voice, I had never thought that deeply about how the voice worked–let’s just say a new special interest was unlocked. I decided to pursue a masters in voice pedagogy and ended up in Houston with my best friend, where I would spend the next eleven years of my life studying, singing, and sweating on the Gulf Coast.

During that time, I worked as the manager of the Houston Symphony Chorus for five years and had the opportunity to learn the inner workings of nonprofit organizations, build a rich and welcoming choral community, and perform some of the classical canon’s greatest choral-orchestral masterworks under the adept leadership of Betsy Cook Weber. I had the privilege to help some of the HSC members strengthen their voices and prepare for auditions, which led me to delve deeper into how to support voices as they age. I coached dozens of high schoolers for Texas All-State Choir and Solo & Ensemble competitions and worked with elite vocal students from the Kinder High School for the Visual and Performing Arts.

In 2020, when it was unsafe to sing in person, I pivoted to teaching online and made the leap to running my studio full time, which has allowed me to reach folks all over the country–I have clients in every time zone in the continental US! I expanded my practice to include gender-affirming speaking and singing voice lessons in 2022, and I am excited to be able to connect with and provide care to fellow members of the LGBTQ+ community.

Voice teachers sing too!

And along with all of this, I have still been singing! My background is in art song and opera, but I also studied jazz improvisation in college and musical theater as an adult. I am grateful to have made my Houston Symphony solo debut singing the Chichester Psalms in 2016 with Andrés Orozco-Estrada, and since then, I have been a featured soloist with the Asheville Symphony, Brazosport Symphony Orchestra, and Houston Masterworks Chorus. I love performing new music and have commissioned and premiered pieces by Samuel Hunter, Mark Buller, Frances Pollock, Jon Grier, and Joshua Zinn. My latest project was a gender-swapped recital of baritone songs and arias that I performed in drag.

As your voice teacher, my goal is to help you achieve *your* vocal goals, whatever they may be! I take a client-centered approach in the studio, so each lesson will have its plan personalized to you–so every one of our meetings could look different. I strive to honor and empower each client as we collaborate to create the speaking or singing sound you desire. And I myself am AuDHD and chronically ill and can relate to bodies and brains that may need a different approach. A voice lesson with me is like a big science experiment–we will try many exercises and tasks and strategies and plans to find out what works best for you!