Brad Balliett

San Quentin Program Director, Composer, Bassoon

New York City-based musician Brad Balliett is in high demand as a composer and bassoonist. Principal bassoon of the Princeton Symphony Orchestra, Brad is an artistic director for the chamber music collective Decoda (Affiliate Ensemble of Carnegie Hall), and performs with the leading new music groups in New York, including Signal, Metropolis Ensemble, and Deviant Septet. Brad has performed with the Houston Symphony, Metropolitan Opera Musicians, New York City Ballet, International Contemporary Ensemble, and Hartford Symphony Orchestra. Festival performances include Marlboro, Tanglewood, June in Buffalo, Newport Jazz Festival, Festspiele Mecklenburg-Vorpommen, and the Lucerne Festival. His creative collaboration with Elliot Cole and Doug Balliett as the band Oracle Hysterical has yielded a number of operatic works, including a spoken-word opera premiered at the Lucerne Festival as a Spotlight Artist in composition. With his twin brother, Doug, Brad hosts a weekly radio show on WQXR’s Q2 Music (The Brothers Balliett), curates a monthly concert series at Spectrum in the Lower East Side, and is on faculty at The Juilliard School (Evening Division). As a teaching artist, Brad regularly leads composition and song-writing workshops in schools, hospitals, prisons, and homeless shelters. Brad graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University in 2005, and holds an MM from Rice University. His hobbies include writing sonnets, running, and reading Shakespeare.