Inés Gómez-Ochoa, Ed.M., is Head of the World Languages Department, K-12, and Upper School Spanish teacher. A Basque by birth and heart, yet with her feet fully grounded in the United States for over three decades, she first landed at the Hartt School-University of Hartford to pursue an Artist Diploma in piano performance. A graduate of the Music Conservatory in Bilbao, Spain, Ms. Gómez-Ochoa earned an M.M. in choral conducting and musicology from the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University, while at the same time studying harpsichord with Elizabeth Wright and pursuing her interests in Early Music performance, Latin American colonial music, and 17th-century theater, having done archival research in Mexico and Cuba. After many years as Music Director at two boarding schools, High Mowing School, New Hampshire, and at The Putney School, Vermont, Ms. Gómez-Ochoa came to New York City in 2007 to pursue a master's degree in Education Leadership at the Klingenstein Center, Teachers College, Columbia University. Aside from Ms. Gómez-Ochoa's career in music, her interest in social justice has led her to Mexico, where she was an international human shield in an indigenous Zapatista community in Chiapas, and later, in 2000 an international observer for the presidential elections. She is interested in education’s capacity to empower individuals to be active and invested contributors in democratic societies, and draws her inspiration from luminaries such as Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Elaine Bernard, Murray Bookchin, Paolo Freire, and Richard Levins.