Born and raised in the Bay Area, Julianne Parayo graduated magna cum laude with Bachelor of Arts degrees in Music and English from Santa Clara University in 2012, where she served as Vice President of her university’s International English Honor Society chapter (Sigma Tau Delta) and was a University Honors Program student. She grew up surrounded by music and the performing arts, dabbling in classical piano, tap, jazz, ballet, and Filipino folk dance from the age of five. Since joining and singing in the San Francisco Girls Chorus at age nine, Julianne has performed continuously in various choral ensembles over the years, most recently in the San Francisco-based women’s vocal ensemble Musae. Prior to working in Poland, she held a full-time position in health care as direct care staff, where she used music-based improvisatory methods to provide therapy for elderly patients with Alzheimer’s and dementia.

Julianne served as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant at Kazimierz Wielki University in Bydgoszcz, Poland for the 2014-2015 school year. She most recently was awarded an extension for her Fulbright grant for the 2015-2016 school year, and has relocated to Warsaw to mentor the incoming grantees of 2015-2016, and to join the Faculty of Applied Linguistics at Uniwersytet Warszawski.

As a vocalist, writer, educator and performer, Julianne intends to highlight the transnational communicative properties of song and language, and desires to bring a sense of agency to others through her work. She is thrilled to facilitate the U.S. Embassy’s English  Language Conversation Club this year, and anticipates the cross-cultural dialogues that will come out of the discussion during this upcoming program.