Sarah Fertig Wang was born and raised in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, USA. She began playing cello in 6th grade at Sunrise Middle School where she randomly signed up for orchestra class and chose cello just to be different since everyone else was signing up for violin. Even sitting in a class of 40 students, it was love at first pizzicato and she soon began studying privately with Dutch cellist Iris Van Eck and performing with every local youth ensemble possible. Sarah attended Furman University where she studied cello with Dr. Richard Maag and received a Bachelor of Music degree in Music Education. Afterwards she received a Master of Music degree in Cello Performance from the University of Texas-Austin where she received a Presidential Scholarship to study with acclaimed pedagogue Phyllis Young. While in Austin she also taught with the University of Texas String Project and played as a member of the Austin Symphony Orchestra.
After graduate school Sarah spent some years teaching orchestra in the public schools of Virginia. There she taught violin, viola, cello and bass to many hundreds of students grades 4-8 in large group settings. She also directed The Youth Orchestra of Fairfax and was a guest conductor at James Madison University's Spring String Thing. Later Sarah lived outside New York City where she continued to work with both young cellists and string orchestras in New York and Connecticut.
Sarah is registered by the Suzuki Association of the Americas to teach all ten Suzuki cello books. The entirety of her Suzuki training was completed with Pamela Devenport at both the School for Strings in New York City and short term summer institutes. She also has Level One Endorsement in Paul Rolland String Pedagogy.
Sarah first traveled to Norway in the summer of 2002 when she was invited by Phyllis Young to accompany her as an assistant for a seminar she was giving in Stavanger. Nearly a decade later in 2011, Sarah moved to Norway with her family. She soon thereafter became a cello teacher at Bergen Kulturskole where she has taught for the last 10 years. She has gotten the opportunity to teach many young Bergen cellists, working with them from their very first moment on the cello through their later years in the fordypning program and Barratt Due Bergen. Sarah also conducts with Nesttun Unge Strykere, a local Bergen youth string orchestra with over 70 members. She has spent many happy Norwegian summer teaching at Sommerstryk and as director of the Ungdomsorkester at Sommerskolen på Halsnøy.