Jonathan Kuuskoski

Jonathan Kuuskoski joins the University of Michigan School of Music, Theater & Dance after serving as director of Entrepreneurship and Community Programs at the University of Missouri School of Music from 2012-2015. While at Mizzou he designed and implemented all aspects of their new Music Entrepreneurship program, including Undergraduate and Graduate Music Entrepreneurship Certificates. These were complemented with extensive career services resources to create engaged learning opportunities for more than 100 students per year. Students subsequently realized hundreds of paid performance and teaching opportunities, several student ventures, collaborations with four local arts organizations, partnerships with the True/False Film Festival and Roots 'n' Blues 'n' BBQ Festival, and more than a dozen arts job placements and internships with such organizations as the Seattle Symphony, Aspen Music Festival, Kansas City Symphony, Odyssey Chamber Music Series, Missouri Chamber Music Series, and Columbia Chorale. Kuuskoski also re-designed and directed Community Music @ Mizzou, a revenue-based umbrella initiative overseeing multiple educational and performance programs that annually employ more than 60 music students while reaching 2,500 community members.
 
Kuuskoski has been featured on The Entrepreneurial Musician podcast, and his work has drawn attention from Symphony Magazine, ID8 Nation, Greg Sandow's ArtsJournal blog, and the Carnegie Foundation, which cited Community Music @ Mizzou in its recent reclassification of the university as an "engaged campus." He regularly presents entrepreneurship workshops at national conferences and other universities, and serves on the faculty for the UMass-Amherst Arts Extension Service, where he designed and teaches their online arts entrepreneurship course for theatre, dance, music, and visual artists. He co-wrote one of the first national studies on arts entrepreneurship training, which was presented at the inaugural College Music Society Summit on Music Entrepreneurship. His first essay is included in Disciplining the Arts: Teaching Entrepreneurship in Context (Rowman and Littlefield Education Press, 2010), and he contributed article revisions to the Grove Dictionary of American Music (Second Edition).
 
As a pianist Kuuskoski has been called "a terrific performer" (The Well Tempered Ear) and he has performed throughout the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Czech Republic, Cyprus, Greece, Norway, and New Zealand. A passionate supporter of new music, he is currently a member of the New Muse Piano Duo (with pianist Paola Savvidou), an ensemble dedicated to commissioning and performing works by living composers for piano four-hands and two pianos. They most recently performed at the Mizzou International Composers Festival. From 2009-2011 they were based in Madison, WI and collaborated with theatre, dance, and visual artists on site-specific performances. In December 2015 the Duo will complete their first album for Blue Griffin Records, including new works by Amy Williams and Gabriel Prokofiev.
 
Kuuskoski holds degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (MM Piano Performance and Pedagogy) and UNC-Greensboro (MBA and BA Music with Honors). He has pursued additional music study at the New Zealand School of Music and at numerous international music festivals.
 
Website(s)
http://music.umich.edu/faculty_staff/bio.php?u=jkuusk