Praised by critics as "an ideal music director whose infectious energy is as contagious as her exuberant and thoroughly committed musicianship," Elizabeth Schulze is currently the music director and conductor of both the Maryland and Flagstaff Symphony orchestras.
Ms. Schulze has held the positions of Associate Conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C., Music Director and Conductor of the Waterloo/Cedar Falls Symphony Orchestra in Iowa, and, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, Assistant Conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic. In recent seasons, she has also been a conducting assistant and cover conductor for the New York Philharmonic.
A strong advocate of music education, Ms. Schulze has led the American Composer's Orchestra in several educational and family concerts in Carnegie Hall and throughout the five boroughs of New York City. While in Iowa, her innovative approach to educational programming led to interactive broadcasts of educational concerts to classrooms throughout the state over the fiber-optic network.
Ms. Schulze was the recipient of the first Aspen Music School Conducting Award in 1991. An honors graduate of Interlochen Arts Academy and Bryn Mawr College, where she earned an A.B. cum laude in Philosophy, she holds graduate degrees in Orchestral and Choral Conducting from SUNY at Stony Brook. The first doctoral fellow in Orchestral Conducting at Northwestern University, working with Victor Yampolsky, she has been a Conducting Fellow at L'Ecole d'Arts Americaines in France as well as at prestigious music festivals in America. At Aspen, she worked with Murry Sidlin, Lawrence Foster and Sergiu Commissiona. As a Tanglewood Fellow, she worked with Seiji Ozawa, Gustav Meier and Leonard Bernstein.