About Me

Cara Ellen Modisett is a collaborative pianist, essayist, editor and teacher and a priest in the Episcopal Church, serving as associate rector at Trinity Episcopal Church in Staunton, Va., where she shares teaching, preaching, pastoral and liturgical ministry, including developing the formation program for all ages (children through adult).

Cara graduated in spring 2022 with an M.Div. from Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, Va., receiving the Bishop Mark Dyer Prize for Theological Reflection and the Ronnie A. Yoder Scholarship in writing, as well as completing a concentration in spirituality and a senior thesis, Guide Us Walking: A Prayerbook for Uncomfortable Spaces. Her work has appeared in Earth & Altar, Doxology, The Living Church and Soul by Southwest.

At VTS, she served as communications associate in the department of Lifelong Learning and seminarian at St. Augustine’s Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C.; at VTS she coordinated weekday compline services and wrote liturgies for Deep Calls to Deep, eFormation and online and physical-space services.

Prior to seminary, Cara was staff collaborative pianist at Radford University, director of communications for St. John’s Episcopal Church and music director at St. Elizabeth’s Episcopal Church in Roanoke, Va. (her sending parish). She graduated from JMU with degrees in English and piano performance and holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from Goucher College. She taught composition and advised the newspaper and literary magazine at Ferrum College and taught English and worked with the music and theater programs at Community High School of Arts and Academics in Roanoke.

Cara lived in Memphis, Tennessee, from 2014 until 2016, serving as minister of communication for Church of the Holy Communion Episcopal. While there, she performed as a pianist at University of Memphis and wrote three cover stories for Memphis magazine. She was curator and writer of the Prayers of the People for the Episcopal Church’s General Convention in 2015 (a project in collaboration with the Society of St. John the Evangelist). While at Holy Communion, she founded the reading series Words3 (Words, Cubed) which continues in Memphis, an incarnation of similar writing series she coordinated in Roanoke through CHS and the Roanoke Symphony/Carilion Clinic.

Cara was editor of Blue Ridge Country magazine for five years, working as an editor and writer for Leisure Publishing (now LeisureMedia360) for 12 as associate editor of The Roanoker magazine and an editor and writer for regional and state visitor/newcomer publications. She has been an announcer, reporter and producer for WVTF public radio and communications advisor for the Episcopal Diocese of Southwestern Virginia. In summer 2014, she was artist in residence in the Dr. Robert L.A. Keeley Healing Arts Program at Carilion Clinic.

Concert venues have included the Manhattan School of Music; Hollins and Washington & Lee universities; the U.S. Army Band’s Brucker Hall and Mill Mountain Theatre. Cara has coordinated performance series at St. Elizabeth’s and at WVTF and reading series at Liminal: alternative artspace, the Roanoke Symphony Orchestra Green Room, co-hosted by Carilion Clinic, at St. John’s Episcopal and at Church of the Holy Communion.

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