Biography

Joel Thompson is a composer, conductor, pianist, and educator. He serves as HGO’s first full-time Composer-in-Residence, holding a five-year residency that commenced in 2022. His engagements with HGO included A Voice Within, his world-premiere song cycle with Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton (2025), Giving Voice (2024) as conductor and pianist, and the world premiere of his first opera, The Snowy Day (2021), created with librettist Andrea Davis Pinkney. Other recent engagements included Thompson’s String Quartet received its world premiere at the Ravinia Steans Institute in July (2025). January 2026 marks the world premiere of Thompson’s orchestration of African Queens, performed by Karen Slack with the Naples Philharmonic, with subsequent performances to be announced. In March 2026, the New York Philharmonic will premiere a new orchestral arrangement of Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated!, featuring variations orchestrated by composers including Thompson.

Career honors include the 2023 Sphinx Medal of Excellence; a 2018 American Prize for his choral work Seven Last Words of the Unarmed; and the 2017 Hermitage Prize in Composition. Thompson has been commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Aspen Music Festival, Bravo! Vail Music Festival, Houston Grand Opera, Los Angeles Master Chorale, Atlanta Master Chorale, San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus, Kansas City Symphony, American Composers Forum, and Sphinx Organization’s EXIGENCE Vocal Ensemble (of which he is a founding member), among others. He holds a B.A. in Music and M.M. in Choral Conducting, both from Emory University, and is currently studying with Christopher Theofanidis at the Yale School of Music for his D.M.A. in Composition. Thompson served as Director of Choral Studies and Assistant Professor of Music at Andrew College and taught at Holy Innocents’ Episcopal School. An alumnus of the Metropolitan Opera/Lincoln Center Theater New Works Program, he was a post-graduate fellow at Arizona State University’s Ensemble Lab/Projecting All Voices Initiative as well as a composition fellow at the 2017 Aspen Music Festival and School.