Brad Balliett is a New York City-based bassoonist, composer, and educator. He is on faculty at The Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University, The Juilliard School, and Bard Prison Initiative, and is a former Artistic Director of Decoda, a chamber music collective in residence at Carnegie Hall.

In New York, Balliett often performs with the Metropolitan Opera, New York City Ballet, the Knights, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and is a member of contemporary music ensembles Signal and Metropolis Ensemble. He has played full seasons with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and the Houston Symphony Orchestra, and has appeared with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and the International Contemporary Ensemble. During the summers, Balliett has spent time at the Marlboro, Tanglewood, Stellenbosch, Newport Jazz, and Lucerne Festivals. He has performed as a soloist with the Houston Symphony and Johannesburg Symphony Orchestras.

As a teaching artist, Balliett regularly leads composition and song-writing workshops in prisons, schools, hospitals, and homeless shelters. Particularly focused on assisting aspiring incarcerated composers, Balliett works with organizations including Bard Prison Initiative, Musicambia, Decoda, and Project Music Heals Us to guide composers and performers at correctional facilities including Sing Sing, San Quentin State Prison (where he is program director for Musicambia), Greenhaven Correctional, Fishkill Correctional, Lee Correctional, Brooklyn Detention Center, various facilities on Riker’s Island, and several others.

As a composer, Balliett has written orchestral, chamber, choral, operatic, and incidental music. Recent commissions have come from Carnegie Hall, Cecelia Chorus, Metropolis Ensemble, and the Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra Wind Ensemble. Recent premieres include Migration Blindness, a concerto for violin and wind ensemble (Courtney Orlando and the Peabody Wind Ensemble), Swamp/Forest, a mixed sextet inspired by birds of South Carolina (Decoda), Field Guide to Birds of Inwood Hill Park, an interactive outdoor work for families in which wind players are scattered through a forest (Experiential Orchestra), and Tanbark Ridge (a wind quintet for The City of Tomorrow). Balliett’s work Arboretum matches instruments to specific trees to create an interactive singing forest, and has been performed in arboretums across the country.

Balliett’s published compositions, including a widely-used book of bassoon studies and chamber music for a range of ensembles, are available through Long Echo Publications and the composer’s website.

Brad Balliett grew up in Westborough, MA, and attended Harvard College (summa cum laude, 2005) to study music composition and Rice University (2007) to study bassoon performance. His teachers include John Harbison, Robert Levin, Christoph Wolff, and Benjamin Kamins.

He spends his free time filming birds. His videos have been featured on local and national news stations.