Guitarist/harper Mike Connors is a resident of High Point North Carolina and the founder and director of the classical guitar and harp programs at Penn-Griffin School for the Arts, a grade 6-12 public school arts magnet. He also teaches guitar and harp at Saint Mary’s Music Academy in High Point. He earned master of music degree in classical guitar from the University of South Carolina in 1992 and a bachelor of music degree from Southern Illinois University in 1987. He studied guitar in Spain, harp in Scotland and Ireland, and currently studies Scottish harp with William Jackson and Irish harp with Grainne Hambly. He and his students are frequent performers.

Before moving to North Carolina in 2002, Mike spent 15 years in Columbia South Carolina  as a classical guitar performer, teacher, and businessman. He started guitar programs at Hammond Academy, Heathwood Hall Episcopal School, and taught guitar and kindermusik at the Montessori Early Learning Center. He also worked as an Arts and Healing Musicican at The South Carolina Cancer Center. He administrated the Summer Guitar Camps at Hammond and Heathwood, and organized and presented the South Carolina Guitar Competitions. 

In 2002, he moved to Greensboro North Carolina to teach guitar full time for Guilford County Schools at Southeast and Southwest Guilford High Schools, and evening classes at Guilford College. He transferred to Penn-Griffin in 2003 to teach guitar and piano. He has been awarded Teacher of the Year, The High Point Mayor’s Award for Arts Educator of the Year, and was twice awarded first runner up for The Guilford County Arts Educator of the Year. The guitar program is currently thriving with 27 auditioned high school classical guitar majors and 19 eighth grade guitar majors who have guitar classes every day. His students are active performers and have won competitions, have been featured in numerous venues, and continued studies and earned degrees at universities and conservatories. Many currently enjoy careers as performers, recording artists, and instructors. In 2012 he began an accredited public school high school harp course, offering daily classes from beginner to honors level.

Mike Connors discovered the harp in 2005, and has rapidly made a name for himself in the celtic harp world. He began teaching himself, and after a year and a half of self-instruction he attended the Somerset Folk Harp Festival in New Jersey and took his first classes with Billy Jackson and Grainne Hambly.  He has since been studying with them privately and at the annual Swannanoa Gathering Celtic Week at Warren Wilson College in Asheville NC. He has also taken classes with Janet Harbison and Kim Robertson at the Southeast Harp Festival, Sue Richards and Marta Cook at The Asheville Mountain Folkharpers, and at highland games with Ann Heyman, Sharon Knowles, and Nancy Clark. He received a scholarship to study at the Ohio Scottish Arts School at Oberlin College in June 2010 where he took classes with Maeve Gilchrist, Allison Miller and Sue Richards.  He also studied in harp pedagogy workshops with Ray Poole and Sharon Knowles. In 2008, his first year of competition, he was promoted by The Scottish Harp Society of America to the level of Journeyman, and in 2010 won the travel scholarship to Scotland where he had lessons with Alison Kinnaird and Cheyenne Brown and participated in festival workshops. The trip is chronicled here:  www.miketheharper.blogspot.com . In 2011 and in 2012 he received 2nd prize at the master level in the US National Scottish Harp Championship. He has had articles published in published in the Folk Harp Journal and The Kilt and Harp Journal. He and his students have been featured in The High Point Enterprise, The Greensboro News and Record, and in live television and radio appearances. His first CD of Irish and Scottish harp music is now available: Castles Caves and Stones. He performed concerts at the 2014 Grandfather Mountain Highland Games, presented a workshop at the 2014 Somerset Folk Harp Festival, and is a competition judge for the Scottish Harp Society of America.