Michelle Huggins-Watts began her teaching career at the Melville Memorial Girls' Anglican primary school then moved on to become Music, English, and English Literature teacher at Trinity College located in Maraval, Trinidad. At Trinity College she was promoted to the post of Dean of Academic Studies and Discipline and then Vice Principal. In 2020, she moved on to her current position as Centre Administrator at The University of the West Indies Open Campus where she has academic and operational responsibilities.

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Michelle has written and presented academic papers on the social and cultural aspects of the steelband art form as well as conducted steelpan education workshops at various academic institutions which include Springfield College in Tampa, Florida and Haydon Bridge High School in England. She has also conducted steelpan education workshops in France and has been the facilitator for the Pan In Schools Coordinating Council’s Panorama Arranging workshop for the past twelve years. She has also served as a music examiner for the Caribbean Examinations Council CSEC exams and holds a First Class Honours Bachelor of Arts degree in Musical Arts and a Distinction in her Postgraduate studies in Educational Administration.

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JOURNEY IN THE STEELPAN ARTFORM

Her first instrument was the piano which she began playing at the age of five. However, her journey into the steelpan arena began at the age of 14 as a Fourth Form student at the St. Francois Girls’ College where she learned to play the tenor pan. There, she ascended to captaincy and having graduated from Sixth Form, she became a member of the T&TEC Power Stars. She also performed with Scrunters' Pan Groove, Casablanca, and Phase II Pan Groove where she was made captain.

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Michelle’s musical experiences also include adjudication at the National Song Festival, Junior Panorama, Junior Steelband Music Festival, National Panorama - Single Pan category and the Antiguan Panorama competition. She has also performed at the prestigious Royal Albert Hall in London, the Westminster Abbey, Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York, with other performances in Canada, France, Holland, Scotland, Wales, Martinique and Barbados.

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As an arranger, Michelle’s first opportunity surfaced in 1987 with the St. Francois Girls Steel Orchestra, when the College’s pan tutor, Mr. McDonald Redhead, invited her to arrange the Tune of Choice for the Schools’ Steelband Music Festival. She subsequently arranged stage side music for T&TEC Power Stars and did her first Panorama arrangements for them in 1994 and 1995. In 1996 she began to arrange for the Junior Panorama Competition and in 1998 she won her first arranging title with the WoodTrin Steel Orchestra.

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Michelle was then approached in 2002 by Valley Harps to arrange the music and conduct the band for the Pan Is Beautiful Steelband Music Festival. Having liked her arrangement of the calypso for that competition, she was asked to arrange for the upcoming Panorama competition of 2003. The band qualified for the Panorama Finals for the first time in its history, in 2004, and continued to be in the top five consistently. Michelle had also arranged for La Creole Pan Groove and Carib Woodbrook Playboyz in the single Pan category with both bands being finalists in the competition.

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Having been knocking on the door of victory for the past few years with Michelle as arranger, Valley Harps finally won the Medium Band title in 2011 and Michelle created cultural history by becoming the first female arranger to win a national Panorama competition. This led to Michelle becoming the co-subject of a BBC World News series entitled “Collaboration Culture” in which she worked with a British conceptual artist to reproduce an electronic musical piece for performance by a steelband.

 

Michelle Huggins-Watts has worked extensively with young people locally and internationally and admires their honesty, open-mindedness, and enthusiasm. She is a very modest person who judges her work by the responses of others and her personality naturally commands the respect of others.