A Practical Philanthropist: The Life and Times of Mary Louise Curtis BOK Zimbalist, Founder of Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781735600178)

Barbara Benedett is senior archivist at the Rock Resource Center, Curtis Institute of Music, where she has been working with the collections since 2012. She holds an MLS from Clarion University and a BS from Drexel University, as well as a BM in music education and an MM in clarinet performance from the University of Delaware. Among her clarinet teachers were Curtis Institute alum Charles Salinger, former Curtis alumni and faculty members Anthony Gigliotti and Donald Montanaro, and former NBC Symphony Orchestra clarinetist David Weber. Benedett is a freelance classical and theater musician and has appeared with the Lancaster and Reading Symphony Orchestras, the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, the DuPont Theater, Arden Theater, and the Delaware Theater Company. During her twenty years as a music educator, Benedett was assistant director of Early Childhood Programs at the Mary Louise Curtis branch of the Settlement Music School, head of the woodwind department at the Music School of Delaware, and adjunct clarinet faculty at the University of Delaware. While at the Settlement Music School, she coauthored Arts Enrichment and School Readiness for Children at Risk, a study of the effects of art-based preschool curricula on at-risk populations that was published in 2010 in the Early Childhood Research Quarterly. In 2025, Benedett was invited to present her research at the James Loeb Musical World conference in Germany. Her paper Mary Louise Curtis Bok Zimbalist, the Settlement Movement, and the founding of the Curtis Institute of Music will be published by Harvard University as part of the conference proceedings. Benedett is currently a member of Delaware Valley Archivists Group (DVAG), the Society of American Archivists (SAA), and the Mid-Atlantic Regional Archivist's Conference (MARAC). She lives in South Philadelphia.