Long Bio (academic)

Mark Micchelli is a pianist, composer, scholar, and educator. His music has been described as “both spontaneous and very intentionally crafted” (I Care If You Listen), “so imaginative and adroit it deserves wider appreciation” (Fanfare Magazine), and “jazz that knows the rules but gets weird with them” (KALW). Dr. Micchelli’s albums include Glitched-On Bop (New Focus Recordings, 2025), featuring jazz standards reimagined for solo piano and improvising computer, and Five Years in Exile (Ropeadope, 2026), featuring an eclectic mix of art song, jazz, punk, and noise. He is also the producer and music director for Mai Khôi’s “Bad Activist,” a multimedia theatrical performance that has been performed over forty times in the US and internationally.

Dr. Micchelli’s compositions have been featured at ISCM World Music Days, ICMC, SEAMUS, SPLICE, and numerous regional music festivals and conferences. As jazz pianist, he has performed at the Smithsonian (Washington, DC), National Sawdust (Brooklyn, NY), the Four Freedoms Award Ceremony (Middelburg, Netherlands), the PEN America World Voices Festival, and jazz clubs throughout the US. As a classical pianist, Dr. Micchelli was a keynote performer at the 2022 Stravinsky in America conference and a featured performer at the 2021 Music on the Edge series. Finally, Dr. Micchelli is a music theorist who received a 2023 SMT Emerging Scholar Award for his Music Theory Online article “Sound Structures and Naked Fire Gestures in Cecil Taylor’s Solo Piano Music.” He has also released an episode for SMT-Pod (where he serves on the production team) and presented scholarship at national and regional music theory conferences.

Dr. Micchelli received his PhD at the University of Pittsburgh, where he was the first graduate to earn a combined degree in Composition/Theory and Jazz Studies. He received his MA in Integrated Composition, Improvisation, and Technology from the University of California-Irvine and his BA in Music and Computer Science from Columbia University. His primary instructors include Amy Williams, Eric Moe, Nicole Mitchell, Mari Kimura, Chris Dobrian, Michael Dessen, Kei Akagi, and Andy Wasserman. In fall 2026, Dr. Micchelli will join the faculty of Temple University as an Assistant Professor of Music Studies. Previously, he served as Visiting Assistant Professor of Composition at West Virginia University and Artist Lecturer in Electronic Music at Carnegie Mellon University.

Mark Micchelli is a pianist, composer, scholar, and educator whose work hybridizes jazz, contemporary classical, and popular music idioms. Recent projects include producing the multimedia autobiography of Vietnamese singer-activist Mai Khôi, writing an article on George Russell’s Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization as it relates to twelve-tone music, hosting a series of house concerts under the moniker “Stage MK,” and releasing an album of jazz standards for solo piano and improvising computer. In fall 2026, Mark will join the faculty of Temple University as an Assistant Professor of Music Studies.