Alison Norris

Conductor

About

About

Dedicated to sharing the sense of awe latent within music and committed to engaging listeners with its contemporary relevance, Brooklyn-based conductor Alison Norris first attracted international attention in 2024 with their multidisciplinary benefit concert project “Divinity and the Cosmos: A Genderqueer Exploration of Messiaen’s Turangalîla Symphonie”. The performance—featuring original films by five other transgender artists—examined each movement of Messiaen’s preeminent work through a genderqueer lens: helping audiences navigate unfamiliar dissonances with the similarly enigmatic nature of trans joy.

In 2024, Norris was appointed Conducting Fellow for the Canton Symphony Orchestra—a position later renewed and expanded for the 2025/26 season. Internationally, Norris has appeared with the London Symphony Orchestra as a finalist in the Donatella Flick Conducting Competition and conducted the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra as a candidate in the 6th Evgeny Svetlanov International Conducting Competition. They were invited to conduct the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra as part of the inaugural Conductors Academy program with Cristian Măcelaru, and were selected to conduct the Orchestre Métropolitain as part of Domaine Forget de Charlevoix’s conducting masterclass with Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

Recent festival engagements include Tanglewood’s Conducting Seminar, where they premiered a new work by Maya Miro Johnson, and the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music as a Conducting Associate.

Norris’s conducting mentors include George Manahan, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Cristian Măcelaru, James Ross, Tito Muñoz, and Oriol Sans. Alison holds a Professional Studies diploma from the Manhattan School of Music, a Masters of Music from UW-Madison, and a Bachelors of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Valparaiso University.