2025/26 Harman/Eisner Artist in Residence

2025/26 Harman/Eisner Artist in Residence
Teddy Abrams

Teddy Abrams will serve as the Aspen Institute Arts Program 2025/26 Harman/Eisner Artist in Residence. In this role, Abrams will offer his artistic vision to various Policy Programs, events, leadership activities and more in Aspen, New York, Washington D.C., and elsewhere.

“I am thrilled and honored to serve as the Aspen Institute’s Artist in Residence this year. Connecting music with diverse disciplines and collaborating with leaders in different fields has long been a passion of mine, and Aspen provides the ideal platform for interdisciplinary thinking and bold creative ideas to flourish,” Abrams said. 

Abrams is a Grammy-winning classical musician and Musical America’s 2022 Conductor of the Year. Serving as Louisville Orchestra’s Music Director since September 2014–as the youngest Director in its 88-year history– Abrams paved the way for community outreach with the “In Harmony” tour throughout Kentucky. In April 2023, Abrams premiered his own composition Mammoth with Yo-Yo Ma in Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave, and in 2024 his piano concerto for Yuja Wang won a Grammy Award. Abrams is now at work on ALI, a new musical about Muhammad Ali that blends and an orchestral work that tells the story of the state of Kentucky, to premiere in the 2025–26 season.

 

More about Teddy Abrams:

Teddy Abrams, born in 1987, is a Grammy Award winner and Musical America’s 2022 Conductor of the Year. He was appointed and has served as Louisville Orchestra’s (LO) Music Director in September 2014 and has been profiled by CBS Sunday Morning, the New Yorker, NPR, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and PBS NewsHour.

Abrams’s achievements include the Louisville Orchestra Creators Corps, a trailblazing initiative that provides a fully funded residency for three composers who receive local housing, a salary, health benefits and dedicated workspaces; and the “In Harmony” tour, a multi-season community-building project on a giant scale funded by the Commonwealth of Kentucky that takes the orchestra to every corner of the state for concerts and special community events. Deemed by the New York Times as a “Maestro of the People,” Abrams “has embedded himself in his community, breaking the mold of modern conductors.”

A prolific and award-winning composer himself, Abrams – as part of the Emerson Collective Fellowship – will compose an orchestral work to premiere in the Louisville Orchestra’s 2025–26 season that tells the story of the state of Kentucky. The raw material for the piece will come from community sessions Abrams leads on visits around the state: time spent with Kentuckians music-making, storytelling, and sharing local history.

In 2025, Abrams will also make his debut with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and guest conduct the Los Angeles Philharmonic, National Symphony Orchestra, and Curtis Symphony Orchestra. This past summer, Abrams returned to the Hollywood Bowl with the Los Angeles Philharmonic for the second consecutive year and conducted NYO2 at Carnegie Hall’s World Orchestra Week! (WOW!).

Abrams served as Assistant Conductor of the Detroit Symphony (2012–14), as Resident Conductor of Hungary’s MAV Symphony Orchestra (2011-2012), and as Conducting Fellow and Assistant Conductor of the New World Symphony (2008–11).