Justin Dello Joio

Justin Dello Joio (Pre-College ’65; BM ’77, MM ’78, DMA ’87, composition), born in New York City, is a seventh-generation composer in the Dello Joio family. Now the faculty composer in residence at New York University, he studied composition at Juilliard with Vincent Persichetti, David Diamond, and Roger Sessions. His first composition teachers at Juilliard Pre-College were Ellen Taafe Zwilich and Hall Overton. Dello Joio was composer in residence for the São Paulo Contemporary Composers Festival in 2018 and the Vienna Summer Music Festival in 2019.

His works have been performed and/or recorded by the Detroit Symphony, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, American Brass Quintet, Garrick Ohlsson, Carter Brey, Ani Kavafian, Jeremy Denk, Jay Campbell, Stephen Gosling, Shai Wosner, and William Wolfram, among others. In 2010, his one-act opera, Blue Mountain, was commissioned, premiered, and recorded in Oslo, Norway, by Det Norske Blåsensemble, and released on Bridge Records. Dello Joio was also commissioned by the Barlow Endowment to write a work for Brey and has been commissioned for a piano concerto by the Boston Symphony for Ohlsson. His works are published by E.B. Marks Music, Theodore Presser Company, and G. Schirmer, and his recordings are available on Bridge Records and Summit Records.

Dello Joio has received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in music, the Lakond Award, the Charles Ives Scholarship from the Academy, the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Koussevitzky Foundation commission. He was named composer of the year by the Classical Recording Foundation in 2007 and received the Ettleson Award from Composers, Inc., in 2014. Additionally, he has received awards and grants from the Barlow Endowment, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, CAPS, the New York State Council on the Arts, Meet the Composer (three grants), the Presser Foundation, and the American Prize in two categories—chamber music and opera—in the same year.