Aalia Hanif is a third-year undergraduate student studying Flute Performance at Northwestern University under Professor John Thorne. Prior to Northwestern, she studied with Leslie Fagan, 2nd Flute of the Nashville Symphony through the Symphony’s Accelerando program, a diversity initiative designed for preparing young musicians for a future orchestral career.

Born in London from a Pakistani background but raised in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, she graduated from Central Magnet School as a Valedictorian in 2019. During her time in Tennessee, she served as Principal flute of Vanderbilt’s Curb Youth Symphony as well as regularly playing in Tennessee’s Mid-State and All-State festivals. She won the Murfreesboro Symphony Emerging Artist Concerto Competition in 2016 and qualified as a finalist for the Mid-South Flute Festival in 2018. Over the summers, she has attended “The Consummate Flutist” as a performer at Carnegie Mellon University, Tennessee’s Governor’s School for the Arts, and Boston University Tanglewood Institute for the Flute Workshop and both the Young Artists’ Wind Ensemble and Orchestra. She has also performed in two masterclasses with Michael Tilson Thomas and was invited to play in the New World Symphony’s side-by-side concert at Miami Beach, Florida in 2018. Most recently, she was named a Finalist in the 2021 New York Flute Club Competition. In November 2021, she will be debuting with the Nashville Symphony.

Outside of music, she enjoys travelling, hiking, and spending time with family and friends. She hopes to travel to all of America’s National Parks for her love of nature and its landscapes. As an alumni of the Accelerando program, she hopes to continue to advocate for diversity in orchestras by working towards becoming an orchestral musician and helping sister diversity programs across the country to inspire a new generation of diverse musicians.