Long Bio (academic)

Mark Micchelli is a composer, pianist, scholar, and educator whose work hybridizes contemporary classical, jazz, and popular music idioms. He is the producer, writer, and music director for Mai Khôi’s “Bad Activist,” a multimedia theatrical performance that has been performed over forty times in the US and internally. Other recent works include Glitched-On Bop, an album of solo piano+electronics music released on New Focus Records in July 2025, and Five Years in Exile, a noisy fusion album to be released on Ropeadope in 2026.

Dr. Micchelli’s compositions have been featured at ICMC, SEAMUS, SPLICE, the Pittsburgh Humanities Festival, the Global State of Human Rights Conference, College Freedom Forum, the Bowling Green New Music Festival, and numerous regional music festivals and conferences. As jazz pianist, he has performed at the Smithsonian (Washington, DC), Joe’s Pub (New York, NY), the Four Freedoms Award Ceremony (Middelburg, Netherlands), the PEN America World Music Festival, the Pittsburgh Jazz Poetry 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 the SMT national conference and regional music theory conferences in the Mid-Atlantic (MTSMA) and Northeast (NECMT).

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. Dr. Micchelli is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor of Composition at West Virginia University. Previously, he served as Artist Lecturer in Electronic Music at Carnegie Mellon University and Instructor at the University of Pittsburgh. He splits his time between Pittsburgh, PA and Morgantown, WV.

Mark Micchelli is a composer, pianist, scholar, and educator whose work hybridizes contemporary classical, jazz, 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. Mark has accrued degrees and awards from several institutions of higher education, and his music has been presented at venues such as Joe’s Pub (NYC), the Smithsonian Museum (Washington, DC), and La Fenice (Venice, Italy). Mark currently serves as a Visiting Assistant Professor of Composition at West Virginia University.