Faculty and Staff
Matthew Recio DMA
Artistic Director of Vox Venti
Chicago
An avid vocal composer, Dr. Matthew Recio collaborates with poets, writers, and artists across the globe to bring text to life in the concert hall and on the theatrical stage. He was the 2019–2021 Vanguard Emerging Opera Composer with Chicago Opera Theatre, where he wrote his one-act opera The Puppy Episode with librettist Royce Vavrek, winning the American Prize Award in Opera Composition.
Passionate about raising marginalized voices, he was a resident composer with the LYNX Project’s Amplify Series, collaborating with poet John-Carlos Schaut to lift nonverbal autistic voices in the art-song sphere. He has also collaborated with Queer In(n) on a vocal work with an adaptive libretto by Dr. Marquese Carter, inspired by the life of trans activist and Chicago icon Mama Gloria. Other projects include Fourth Coast Ensemble’s WordSong series — where he was a featured winner of the Chicago SongSlam series for How We Hush — and his Ravinia debut with Might be Equal, commissioned for tenor Ryan Townsend Strand’s album Letters to Jackie.
He has collaborated with Chicago-based choir Stare at the Sun on multiple projects, most notably an immersive choral cantata, The Hollow, exploring isolation, depression, emergence, and renewal, with libretti by Alejandra Villareal Martínez. His instrumental work has been represented at the Midwest Composer Symposium, the UNK Music Festival, and the Hammer and Nail Dance collaboration. Chamber works have received recognition at the IMTA young artist composition competition and the Quartet Nouveau competition. He is a published artist under the Dale Warland Series through G. Schirmer/Hal Leonard.
A summa cum laude graduate and Charles F. Hockett Scholarship recipient of Ithaca College (B.M., composition), he completed the D.M.A. in composition with a minor in choral conducting at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music, where he was a Jacobs fellowship recipient and associate instructor in aural skills. Principal teachers included Dana Wilson, Claude Baker, Aaron Travers, Don Freund, David Dzubay, Eric Ewazen, P.Q. Phan, and Sven-David Sandström. He is on faculty in the musical studies department at the DePaul University School of Music.