This episode, Julie sits down with fiddler, teacher, composer, and explorer Karina Wilson. Born into a contradance family, she was dancing to the fiddle in the womb and music and dance have been her north star since before time began. Growing up she avidly studied classical violin through her childhood and youth and fostered an everlasting love affair with English and contra dance music amidst the rich folk scene of her native New Mexico. Today there’s not much that Karina doesn’t do, as long as it involves music. She teaches and directs a private violin/viola studio, arranges and records for a handful of music studios in northern New Mexico, and performs with multiple groups in Santa Fe including a slightly sacrilegious honky-tonk gospel group, and old-time/blues group, various folk and dance groups, the incredible New Mexican/Mexican traditional music group Lone Piñon, and her own international tradfolk group the Big Heart Band. She still plays for contra and ECD working with bands and musicians such as the Gaslight Tinkers, Larry Unger, Jeff Spero, and George Paul. In their interview over Zoom Julie and Karina discuss the New Mexico folk dance and music scene that has been so central in her life, her style as a dance musician, and the musical wanderlust, which has led her across 3 continents and 23 countries/territories in search of the complete and true context that surrounds traditional music within each unique culture.