Mélanie Léonard
Assistant Professor
Born in Montreal, Mélanie Léonard is the music director of Symphony New Brunswick. She has also been resident and associate conductor of the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra and Music Director of the Sudbury Symphony Orchestra.
As a guest conductor, she worked with renowned orchestras including the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, Orchestre Métropolitain, Les Violons du Roy, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and the National Art Center Orchestra.
In 2014, she founded the Wild West New Music Ensemble in Calgary, for which she was Music Director and Conductor. During the same year, she co-founded the Calgary New Music Festival and served as its Artistic Director until 2016. She was also the founder and conductor of Ensemble Prima, a Montreal-based chamber ensemble dedicated to twentieth and twenty-first century music.
Maestra Léonard has recorded soundtracks for Aura at Montréal’s Notre-Dame Basilica; Land of Fantasy, a Cirque du Soleil show presented in Hangzhou, China; and Paradise City, an immersive multimedia universe in South Korea.
Ms. Léonard was the first woman to complete a doctorate in orchestra conducting from the Université de Montréal. She holds a bachelor degree in Music Theory from the same university. She received her Masters of Music in Orchestra Conducting from the Hartt School of Music (Hartford, Connecticut). She studied with Maestri Paolo Bellomia, Jean-François Rivest, and Christopher Zimmerman. She received the Canada Art Council’s Jean-Marie Beaudet award for orchestral conducting.
