Inge Engelbrecht completed her bachelor’s degree in music in 2002 at the Stellenbosch University (SU), after which she worked as an educator in Washington, DC, the United Arab Emirates and South Korea. She returned to South Africa in 2008 and began working in the Certificate Programme in Music at the SU Music Department in 2009, and subsequently in the Higher Certificate course, the Diploma in Practical Music course and the degree programme. She completed her honours degree in music education in 2010 with a dissertation investigating the academic and social profile of the Certificate Programme students within a novel musical context. In 2014, Inge began work on the Genadendal project, which aimed to document the music practices and traditions of this first mission station in South Africa. She completed her master’s degree in musicology (cum laude) in 2017 with the thesis entitled Komponiste van Genadendal (Composers from Genadendal), a work that analyses and documents the lives and compositions of three coloured composer-musicians who have strong ties to Genadendal. She has presented research papers at musicological conferences across South Africa, as well as at the Writing about Contemporary Artists conference at the University of Surrey in 2017 and the Christian Congregational Music conference in Oxford in 2019. Her publications include a review article titled District Six-Kanala: why I am not laughing (2018). Her research interests include Christian church music practices and the music practices of coloured people and communities in South Africa.
She is currently a PhD candidate in musicology at the Africa Open Institute for Music, Research and Innovation at SU where the main focus of her study is the music and practices of the koortjie in the coloured church communities of the Western Cape.