Bio

Mark Micchelli is a composer, pianist, scholar, and educator based in Pittsburgh, PA. He is the producer and music director for “Bad Activist,” a multimedia theatrical performance that has been performed over forty times in the US and internally. His other recent works include Glitched-On Bop, an album of solo piano+electronics music to released on New Focus Records in July 2025, and Five Years in Exile, an jazz fusion album to be released in 2026.

Micchelli’s compositions have been performed at ICMC, SEAMUS, SPLICE, the Global State of Human Rights Conference, the PEN America World Voices Festival, and the Pittsburgh Humanities Festival. As a classical pianist, Micchelli was a keynote performer at the 2022 Stravinsky in America conference and a featured performer at the 2021 Music on the Edge Series. As jazz pianist, he has performed at the Smithsonian (Washington, DC), Joe’s Pub (New York, NY), the Pittsburgh Jazz Poetry Festival, and numerous jazz clubs throughout the US. Finally, 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 presented his scholarship at the SMT national conference and regional music theory conferences in the Mid-Atlantic (MTSMA) and Northeast (NECMT).

Micchelli received his PhD at the University of Pittsburgh, where he was the first doctoral student to pursue a hybrid 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 composition instructors include Amy Williams, Eric Moe, Nicole Mitchell, Mari Kimura, Chris Dobrian, and Michael Dessen. Micchelli has served as Artist Lecturer in Electronic Music at Carnegie Mellon University and Instructor at the University of Pittsburgh.