As a music director and guest conductor committed to collaboration, innovation and education,
Sarah Ioannides creates vibrant programming that inspires her
audience. She was praised by the New York Times for her “undisputed strength and authority.” She
is music director of Washington State’s Symphony Tacoma and resident conductor of the National
Youth Orchestra of the United States of America. While centred on the USA,
her career as a conductor has taken her to six continents.

Sarah Ioannides was born in Australia and has a Cypriot-Scottish
family background. She studied in England (Universität Oxford, Guildhall School) and in the USA
(Juilliard School and Curtis Institute). Before assuming her role at Symphony Tacoma in 2014,
she established a reputation as the dynamic music director of both the El Paso Symphony Orchestra in Texas and the Spartanburg Philharmonic in South Carolina.
Philharmonic in South Carolina.

Her extensive repertoire, spanning four centuries, is enriched by her work with contemporary composers; as a conductor she has led over 60 premieres as well as North American and European national premieres. She has worked with the likes of Steve Reich, Aaron J. Kernis, Zosha Di Castri and Patrice Rushen; one of her earliest operatic projects was the European national premiere of Stephen Paulus’ The Woodlanders. In the early years of her career, Tan Dun was her mentor, premiering his Water Passion after St. Matthew in Australia and Greece and assisting him with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

Since becoming the first woman to hold a full-time conducting position with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, she has appeared as a guest conductor with orchestras across North America, including the Buffalo Philharmonic, Charleston Symphony, Hamilton Philharmonic, Hawaii Symphony, Louisville Orchestra, North Carolina Symphony, and Orchester Symphonique de Québec , Roanoke Symphony, Rochester Philharmonic Sarasota Orchestra, Toledo Symphony and Tulsa Symphony.

In addition to her concerts with the Symphony Tacoma, her North American schedule includes concerts with the Florida Orchestra, Santa Fe Pro Musica and San Antonio Symphony in 2023-24. The program is broad and ranges from Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Berlioz, Brahms, Dvořák, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, Bartók and Korngold to rediscovered composers such as Louise Farrenc, Florence Price, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Joseph Boulogne as well as contemporary works by Aaron J. Kernis, Valerie Coleman, Bernard Roumain, Nick DiBerardino and Jesse Montgomery.

Outside of North America, Sarah Ioannides was and is, among others, guest at the Bilbao Symphony Orchestra, Brussels Philharmonic, Daejeon Philharmonic, Gothenburg Symphony, Konzerthausorchester Berlin, Malmö Symphony, Nordic Chamber Orchestra, Tonkunstler-Orchester (Vienna), Orchester National de Lyon, Royal Philharmonic (London) and Simón Bolívar Symphony.

Through the creative use of technology, she has realized numerous multimedia projects both in the concert hall and in digital space, thereby broadening the musical horizons of participants and audience. Notable are videos illustrating Holst’s Planets, Steve Reich’s Desert Music and Milhaud’s Création du Monde, as well as – during the COVID-19 pandemic – Symphony Tacoma’s Encore Series and the “digital collage” Eternal Light, inspired by Mozart’s Requiem clips of music, dance, poetry and visual art combined, created by students in the Pacific Northwest, created by students in the Pacific Northwest.

Sarah Ioannides makes a significant contribution to the field of education with Cascade Conducting & Composing: she is the founding director of this annual program in Tacoma, which was launched in 2017 and offers scholarships to various musicians from the USA and the rest of the world. The university orchestras she has conducted include those at Yale University, the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia and the Jacobs School of Music in Bloomington. Sarah Ioannides is a sought-after guest speaker, serves on numerous advisory boards and was a member of the US government’s National Education Association (NEA). In 2022, she spoke at the Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s Women in Classical Music symposium and conference. In June 2023, she was a panelist at Bridges to the Future and the League of American Orchestras conference.

2023 / 2024

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