Sara Fraker is Professor of Oboe at the University of Arizona School of Music and a member of the Tucson Symphony Orchestra. She is principal oboist of the Grammy-nominated ensemble, True Concord Voices & Orchestra, and spends her summers in residence as a faculty artist at the Bay View Music Festival in northern Michigan. As a wind chamber musician, she has performed extensively with the Arizona Wind Quintet, Arizona Reed Quintet, and Bay View Wind Quintet.

Sara's innovative collaborations often explore intersections of music and ecology. She collaborated with dendrochronologist Margaret Evans (UA Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research) and Australian composer Lachlan Skipworth to commission Pine Chant (2021) for reed trio and electronics, a project inspired by tree-ring data and climate crisis. The piece was featured in For The Wild podcast, the Arizona Republic, Arizona Daily Star, and won "Work of the Year – Chamber Music" at the 2023 Australian Art Music Awards. 

Most recently, Sara helped build a multidisciplinary team that was awarded a 2024-25 $100K Annual Resilience Theme grant, administered by the Arizona Institute for Resilience. The Watershed Soundscape project includes new commissions, concerts, and workshops that explore themes of water stewardship and restoration in the Santa Cruz River Watershed. This work fuses watershed science with sensory experiences to promote educational outreach grounded in Tucson’s unique sense of place. With clarinetist Jackie Glazier and bassoonist Marissa Olegario, she commissioned Resonancia Natural for reed trio, electronics and video art, by composer Carolina Heredia and visual artist Heather Bird Harris.

Sara served as executive producer, score editor and oboist for two recent recording projects, Johanna Beyer: Music for Woodwinds (New World Records, 2022; editions published by Frog Peak Music) and Hans Winterberg: Chamber Music (Toccata Classics, 2018). Sara recently premiered and recorded an exciting new commission for oboe and piano by composer S. Maggie Polk Olivo, entitled White Sand & Gray Sand (2020). In 2024, she played the North American premiere of Lachlan Skipworth's Oboe Quartet (2020) for oboe, violin, cello and piano. She also produced Dream States (Arizona Wind Quintet, (Soundset Recordings, 2024), an album by living composers of Arizona and Mexico.

Thrilled to recently join Buffet Crampon's roster of artists, Sara plays a Buffet Légende oboe.

Sara is the recipient of an Artist Research and Development Grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts for a solo commissioning and recording project, in collaboration with composer Asha Srinivasan and ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer. The resulting piece, Braiding, was featured on CBC Radio in 2020. An advocate for interdisciplinary creative work, she is an affiliated faculty member at UA’s Institute for Resilience (AIR).

With pianist Casey Robards, Sara released the album BOTANICA on MSR Classics in 2019. She has also recorded for Summit Records, Toccata Classics, Analekta, and Reference Recordings. She has presented recitals at six recent conferences of the International Double Reed Society, including Tokyo, Boulder and New York City. She has given masterclasses at universities and performing arts schools across the US, in Mexico and Australia. Sara performed the Mozart Oboe Concerto with the Sierra Vista Symphony and Jennifer Higdon's Oboe Concerto with the UA Wind Ensemble. In October 2024, she played the American premiere of Judith Weir's Oboe Concerto with UA's Arizona Symphony Orchestra.

Raised in New Haven, Connecticut, Sara is a graduate of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (DMA), New England Conservatory (MM), and Swarthmore College (BA). Sara held the Gillet Fellowship at the Tanglewood Music Center and was a participant in the Tanglewood Bach Seminar. She has also performed at the Aspen Music Festival, Shenandoah Valley Bach Festival, Chautauqua, Spoleto Festival USA, and the Schleswig-Holstein Orchester Akademie in Germany. She was a National Merit Scholar and recipient of the Garrigues Scholarship, Peter Gram Swing Prize, and Kate Neal Kinley Memorial Fellowship. Her principal teachers include Robert Botti, John Dee, Mark McEwen, Jonathan Blumenfeld, Sandra Gerster Lisicki, and John de Lancie.