Donna M. Di Grazia holds the David J. Baldwin Professorship in Music at Pomona College and is a two-time recipient of a Wig Distinguished Professor Award for Excellence in Teaching (2003, 2017). 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 with research interests in 19th-century music and early 17th-century English sacred music. This work has received support from numerous sources including the National Endowment for the Humanities and has been published by various presses of national and international standing, including Routledge, Ashgate, Oxford University Press, and the University of California Press.
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. She is currently a founding member of the choral ensemble PRISM (prismensemble.org), also serving as one of its two artistic directors.
In addition to conducting the Choir and Glee Club, she teaches courses at Pomona in music history for majors and non-majors. Read more about Professor Di Grazia.
Professor Di Grazia: Thatcher 211 | (909) 607-2452 | Email