Rebecca Smithorn
Assistant Conductor

​Rebecca Smithorn is a conductor living in Baltimore, Maryland. She has recently conducted in master classes with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, and the United States Army Orchestra, and has worked with Marin Alsop, Gerard Schwarz, Leon Fleisher, and Gustav Meier, among others. She is the assistant conductor of Urban Playground Chamber Orchestra in New York City and serves as a cover conductor for the Cincinnati Ballet.
 
Ms. Smithorn was the founder and conductor of Ad Hoc, an award-winning chamber orchestra in Rochester, New York, which was nominated as a Maverick Classical Music Ensemble on ArtsJournal's Sandow. She was also recently nominated for the Conductor's Guild Thelma A. Robinson Award, a biennial award for promising young conductors. She has received career development awards from the Sigurd I. & Jarmila H. Rislov Foundation in Ann Arbor, Michigan and from the Arts and Cultural Council of Greater Rochester.
 
A committed educator, Ms. Smithorn’s teaching centers on building intentional listening skills, musicianship training, and equal access to music education. She has served as a teaching artist at MyCincinnati, an El-Sistema-inspired program, and is currently a teaching artist with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s OrchKids initiative, an El-Sistema-inspired program in Baltimore City Schools.
 
As a pianist, Ms. Smithorn has given solo, chamber, and lecture recitals at the Steinway Recital Hall of St. Louis, the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, the Diastole Scholars Center, the Brevard Music Festival, and the Eastman School of Music, among others. She is a faculty member in applied piano at Severn School and remains active as a collaborative pianist.
 
Ms. Smithorn also served as the Manager of Grants for the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra, where she advocated for the orchestra’s education and community engagement programs, preparing successful proposals for the National Endowment for the Arts, Carnegie Hall's Spring for Music Festival, the ASCAP Award for Adventurous Programming, and many others. 
 
Ms. Smithorn holds a bachelor of music in music theory from the University of Missouri - Kansas City, where her analysis focused on the use of narrative in the works of Robert Schumann and was recognized as some of the most innovative undergraduate research university-wide. She holds a master’s degree in orchestral conducting from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, where she studied with Mark Gibson. She is currently a doctoral student at the Peabody Conservatory, where she studies with Marin Alsop and Markand Thakar.