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 recently completed their tenure as the Conducting Fellow for the Canton Symphony Orchestra—a position they won in 2024 and that had since been renewed and expanded for the 2025/26 season.

Internationally, Norris has appeared as a finalist in the Donatella Flick Conducting Competition with the London Symphony Orchestra, been invited as a guest conductor with the China International Philharmonic Orchestra in Beijing, and conducted the Orchestre Métropolitain as a conducting finalist with Yannick Nézet-Séguin in Domaine Forget de Charlevoix. Recent festival engagements include Tanglewood’s Conducting Seminar, where they were invited to premiere a new work by Maya Miro Johnson, and the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music as a Conducting Associate.

Always seeking to foster musical fascination alongside human compassion, in 2024 Norris organized a multidisciplinary benefit concert project entitled “Divinity and the Cosmos: A Genderqueer Exploration of Messiaen’s Turangalîla Symphonie”. They collaborated with five other transgender artists to create original films examining each movement of Messiaen’s preeminent work through a genderqueer lens: helping audiences navigate unfamiliar dissonances with the similarly enigmatic nature of trans joy.

Norris’s conducting mentors include George Manahan, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Jim Ross, Cristian Măcelaru, Leonard Slatkin, 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.