Bente Hemsing is a trained instrumentalist and violin teacher from Østlandets Musikkonservatorium in Oslo. She also has an intermediate subject in Folk Memory Studies and a major subject in Musicology at the University of Oslo in addition to campus education. She worked for several years as a performing musician in Valdres' folk music group and as an archivist in the folk music archive in Valdres. Bente has had freelance assignments for NRK, as an orchestral musician in professional symphony orchestras and she has toured for the National Concerts both in Norway and in India. For a period she was a regular violinist in the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra and in the Oslo Baroque Orchestra.
Educational activities include teaching in cultural schools, in upper secondary school, at the Barratt Due music institute, at various orchestral and folk music seminars, and as a lecturer on traditional music at university level. Bente is also useful as a judge on competitions and in juries for music scholarships.
Bente has won several awards such as "Andris Dahles Minnepris" for sound song playing on hard fiddle (1998), and in 2004 she released the critically acclaimed CD "Solé sprett" with self-arranged folk music from Valdres.
With her special ability for teaching, talent development and not least the dissemination of musical joy, she is a sought-after educator. In recent years, she has worked as a daily leader of the Austnorsk folkemusksksenter, which is a competence center in the MØST network for professional musicians in Austland. She now works as a cultural school principal in Etnedal municipality and as a freelance musician and pedagogue on hard fiddle and violin.