Joanne Donnellan

Our main contact in Washington is Joanne Donnellan who retired two years ago from a string teaching career of 30 years in the Ferndale public schools, most of which was spent teaching high school orchestra and elementary strings.  When she retired, her high school orchestra program had grown to 126 students, one of the largest programs in Washington.
Joanne’s interest in strings came from her father, John Stendal, who grew up in Steindal in Flora district in Norway, and immigrated to America in 1921, bringing his Hardanger fiddle and the Norwegian tunes in his head to America with him.   She loved the sound of the Hardanger fiddle and the music her dad played, and learned to play these tunes from him.   When she was 10 years old she began her formal violin training in a public school strings class in Kent, Washington