Joanna MacGregor

Joanna MacGregor
Joanna MacGregor at a recital, University of Bath
Background information
Born	(1959-07-16) 16 July 1959 (age 57)
Occupation(s)	Musician, composer, conductor
Instruments	Piano

Joanna MacGregor OBE (born 16 July 1959) is a British concert pianist, conductor, composer, and festival curator. She is Head of Piano at the Royal Academy of Music and a Professor of London University.

MacGregor grew up in North London, and was educated at home, with her brother and sister, by her parents; she won a free place to South Hampstead High School at the age of 11. Her mother is a piano teacher and taught her as a little girl, and her father worked in the printing trade. Joanna began studying with Christopher Elton at the age of seventeen, and read music at New Hall now Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge (1978–81) where she was taught composition by Hugh Wood. After Cambridge, she pursued postgraduate studies at the Royal Academy of Music. She became Head of Piano at the Royal Academy of Music in 2011.

Unusually, in the early years of her performing career, Joanna MacGregor was a prolific composer for the theatre (including Cheek by Jowl, and Oxford Stage Company's production of Hamlet at Elsinore Castle and Edinburgh Festival). She was one of the first artists to be selected for the Young Concert Artists Trust in 1985, and has since performed in over seventy countries, appearing as a solo artist with many of the world's leading orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, London Symphony Orchestra, Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Berlin Symphony Orchestra, London Philharmonia, Melbourne Symphony and Sydney Symphony Orchestras, Hong Kong Philharmonic, BBC Symphony and Salzburg Camerata. The many eminent conductors with whom she has worked include Pierre Boulez, Sir Simon Rattle, Sir Colin Davis, Michael Tilson Thomas, and Valery Gergiev, and she has appeared in many of the world's greatest venues, including the Wigmore Hall, Southbank Centre and the Barbican in London, Sydney Opera House, New York’s Lincoln Center, Leipzig Gewandhaus, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and the Mozarteum in Salzburg.