Colleen Potter Thorburn is a professional harpist who has been providing high-quality live harp music for concerts and special events for over fifteen years. She is based in southwest Virginia. She travels frequently and far for concert engagements, performing not only in Roanoke and Blacksburg, but also in West Virginia, North Carolina, and northern Virginia. She performs primarily on a concert grand pedal harp, but is also available to play folk, Irish, and Celtic selections on her 36-string lever harp.

As an events harpist, Colleen plays regularly for wedding ceremonies, cocktail hours, wedding receptions and parties, and corporate or other special events. As a solo events harpist, She maintains an up-to-date sample repertoire list for multiple styles of music, ranging from standard classical selections like Canon in D to show-stopping virtuoso harp pieces such as Fauré's Impromptu. She is comfortable making musical recommendations for a variety of musical tastes and happily accommodates her clients' musical requests. Each event she plays takes on a truly unique musical character, be it a wedding processional featuring Grandjany's Aria in Classic Style and Guridi's Viejo Zortzico, or a recessional featuring the hit 1970s rock song "Lovely Day" and Colleen's own arrangements of Beatles tunes.

Colleen is a nationally-recognized soloist, a winner of the American Harp Society's national Anne Adams Awards, and she holds performance degrees in harp from the University of Illinois (BM) and the Yale School of Music (MM and MMA). Colleen performs regularly as a tenured principal harpist with the Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra in New London, CT, and with her horn-and-harp duo Apple Orange Pair in both New England and the mid-Atlantic region. She has performed in diverse settings with celebrated artists, ranging from the Yale Philharmonia in Carnegie Hall and the Aspen Chamber Symphony with Joshua Bell at the Aspen Music Festival, to playing back-up harp for Kanye West's Chicago-area shows.

As a multi-faceted soloist, chamber musician, and orchestral player, Colleen is especially committed to promoting musical causes that engage audiences in fresh ways, invite new creative work from young composers, and make classical music both artistically and financially accessible to community and regional audiences. Colleen has especially invested herself in community music-making and awareness as an instructor of music not only at prestigious universities like Yale and Fairfield University, but also at community colleges, where she has especially enjoyed teaching music appreciation courses for non-music majors. Colleen currently teaches harp at Bluefield College in Bluefield, VA, in addition to offering private harp and piano lessons both through her own studio as well as through the college's Fine Arts Community School. She is comfortable and experienced working with harp students of all ages and skill levels.