About the Conductor

Donna M. Di Grazia holds the David J. Baldwin Professorship in Music at Pomona College and has been a recipient of a Wig Distinguished Professor Award for Excellence in Teaching. A northern California native, she received her B.A. and M.A. degrees from the University of California, Davis, where she studied choral conducting with Albert McNeil and musicology with D. Kern Holoman; she received her Ph.D. in musicology from Washington University, St. Louis, where she studied with Hugh Macdonald, Michael Beckerman, and Craig Monson.

Along with her responsibilities as a conductor, she is an active musicologist and published scholar, and her research in the areas of nineteenth-century music and seventeenth-century English music has received support from numerous sources including the National Endowment for the Humanities.

She is also an active choral musician, having sung for nine years with the Grammy© award-nominated St. Louis Symphony Chorus and its more select Chamber Chorus, where she sang under such internationally acclaimed conductors as Leonard Slatkin, Nicholas McGegan, Robert Shaw, Erich Leinsdorf, Thomas Peck, and Helmut Rilling. More recently, she has appeared in choral performances in Los Angeles with Musica Angelica Baroque Orchestra, and in various venues throughout southern California with the Los Angeles-based professional choir, the Millennium Consort Singers.

In addition to conducting the Choir and Glee Club, she teaches courses at Pomona in music history for majors and non-majors. Read more.