When Zoe Shiner is not attending her pre-veterinarian classes at Purdue University, she loves to escape her reality through music and teach others to do the same through mentoring at The Festival of the Bluegrass Kids Music Camp in Lexington, Kentucky.
For the past decade, Zoe has used music as her way to escape from the world, but her first taste of music was a bit different from other bluegrass musicians. Raised in a family of music lovers, her parents were obsessed with the Grateful Dead – taking Zoe to a concert at three years old and buying her a guitar for Christmas.
Rock music would not be Zoe’s destiny. First drawn to the warm tones of the mandolin, Zoe eventually took up the fiddle and the guitar—although she played them in a vastly different style than her dad initially imagined. She was a 6th grader when she started performing at countless music festivals and getting involved in her bluegrass community.