Laura Talbott began studying the violin at the age of 12 in her hometown of Carmel, Indiana. She received a Bachelor of Music, summa cum laude, in violin performance from Vanderbilt University in 1997. In the same year, Laura left a section violin position with the Nashville Symphony to pursue a Master of Music degree at the University of Michigan, which she completed in 1998. While at UofM, she received the Tuesday Musicale of Detroit Award for excellence in performance. Dr. Talbott received the Doctor of Musical Arts degree from Boston University in May 2004. Her principal teachers have included Paul Kantor, Christian Teal, Peter Zazofsky, and John Kochanowski. She has performed in master classes for Dorothy DeLay and Ian Swenson, and has received chamber music coachings from members of the American, Emerson, Concord, and Blair string quartets. Dr. Talbott has spent summers at Interlochen, Meadowmount, Tanglewood, and the Aspen Music Festival, where during the summers of 1994-1996, she was a fellowship student.

Dr. Talbott is an active orchestral performer, performing with the New Hampshire Symphony, Nashville Symphony, Ann Arbor Symphony, Cantata Singers Chamber Orchestra, Boston Lyric Opera, Oklahoma City Philharmonic, and the Boston Pops Esplanade Orchestra.

An avid chamber musician, she served as the principal violinist of the Janus 21 Chamber Ensemble of Boston. Dr. Talbott recently performed as part of the Brightmusic Chamber Music Series in Oklahoma City. During the summer of 2005, she performed at Mannes Conservatory's annual Beethoven Institute in New York. Most recently, Dr. Talbott appeared on the Tulsa Brown Bag-It Recital Series with pianist Amy I-Lin Cheng. In addition, Dr. Talbott is the Artistic Director of the Frontiers New Music Ensemble, an ensemble she founded along with colleague Dr. Paul Popiel. Dr. Talbott has appeared as a recitalist throughout the mid-west, southeast, and northeast United States. In the summer of 2006, she will embark on a recording project to feature music for violin and double bass with husband and bassist, George Speed.

Laura has held teaching positions at the Bands and Orchestras of America Summer Symposium, the Meadowmount School of Music, as well as at Boston University, where she assisted Peter Zazofsky. During the summer of 2005, she attended the Juilliard School's Exceptional Students/Exceptional Teaching Symposium in New York, NY. Along with her OSU string area colleagues, Dr. Talbott is an active proponent of string education within Oklahoma, presenting string clinics at high schools throughout the state. She serves as an elected Member-at-Large of the Oklahoma chapter of the American String Teachers Association (ASTA). The former director of the Indian Hill Chamber Orchestra, Dr. Talbott recently completed a five-year tenure at the Indian Hill Music Center in Littleton, Massachusetts, where she served as the head of the string department and directed an annual summer string festival. Currently, she is Assistant Professor of Violin and Viola at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, OK. In addition to her studio teaching duties at OSU, Dr. Talbott runs the annual OSU Horizons String Chamber Music Camp, an event that attracts high school string players from Oklahoma and neighboring states. Dr. Talbott also maintains a studio of pre-college violinists and violists.

Initially triggered by her own experiences with overuse-injuries, Dr. Talbott is actively involved in educating OSU and Oklahoma string students about the biomechanics of playing the violin/viola and over-use injury prevention and rehabilitation. She has participated in the Ithaca College Healthy Musician Symposium, an event that addresses the issue of performing arts injuries from multiple perspectives--that of the health care practitioner, the musician, and the educator--pulling information from the Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais, and Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP). In 2005, Dr. Talbott organized a three-day workshop at OSU featuring Andover Educator Chairperson, Dr. Amy Likar. Dr. Likar worked with OSU students, members of the Stillwater community, and OU students to increase awareness of the biomechanics of string playing (Body Mapping).

Dr. Talbott is a member of the American String Teacher Association (ASTA), the College Music Society, Music Educators National Committee (MENC), Oklahoma Music Educators Association (OMEA), and Pi Kappa Lambda National Music Honor Society