Dr. Bettina S. Muehlenbeck studied piano, musicology, philosophy, as well as English and German literature at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Robert Schumann Conservatory Düsseldorf, Folkwang University of the Arts in Germany, the University of Wyoming, and the University of Bern in Switzerland. She received a 2nd Bachelor of Music in Piano Performance from the University of Wyoming and holds her Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy in Musicology from the University of Bern. Her research areas of interest include piano culture from the eighteenth century through the twentieth, nineteenth-century musico-cultural transfer, Romanticism and Victorianism, as well as historically informed performance practice and aesthetics. Dr. Muehlenbeck has published extensively on the English pianist-composer William Sterndale Bennett (1816–75) and his continental counterparts, including in her book William Sterndale Bennett – Von fernen Ländern und Menschen: Reisetagebücher 1836 bis 1842 with Wehrhahn Publishing House in Hannover, Germany. She is also the author of an invited contribution to a themed edition of Nineteenth-Century Music Review celebrating Sir William’s bicentennial with On Musical Journeys: William Sterndale Bennett’s Diaries, 1836–1842, published by Cambridge University Press in 2016, in addition to an invited article on Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy and William Sterndale Bennett in Ad Parnassum. A Journal of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Instrumental Music, Ut Orpheus Edizioni, Bologna, Italy. She has also been a keynote presenter for the annual festival of the American Matthay Association for Piano.

Dr. Muehlenbeck has held various academic leadership and teaching positions, including: Director of Global Learning and Professor of Music and Humanities (Saint Francis University, Pennsylvania/Southern France), Senior Research Scholar at the University of Music Franz Liszt Weimar (Germany), Director and Chief Academic Officer of Bowling Green State University-Salzburg (Austria), Senior Advisor for International Programs and Partnerships (Gratz College, Philadelphia), Assistant Professor of the Arts in Honors (Grand Valley State University, Michigan), Piano Chair and Assistant Professor of Musicology and Piano (University of Minnesota Duluth), and Research Scholar at the Robert and Clara Schumann Research Center in Düsseldorf (Germany). She has also been honored to serve as External Examiner in the Ph.D. Piano Performance program at Monash University in Australia, as well as piano guest clinician at Mozarteum University Salzburg in Austria.