Dr. Amanda Quist is the Director of Choral Activities for the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami. She directs the graduate program in Choral Conducting and is conductor of the award-winning Frost Chorale. Under her direction, Frost Chorale has been invited to perform with the New World Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, with the Martha Mary Concert Series, in collaboration with professional ensembles Voces8 and Seraphic Fire, and Frost Chorale has been featured on wwfm.org, The Classical Network. She led the choir on an international choir tour through England and France in 2022. Dr. Quist created the Seraphic Fire Scholars program, and conducting internship partnerships with the Master Chorale of South Florida, and the Miami Children’s Chorus. Dr. Quist’s current and former students have won multiple awards, grants, and are leading music in their communities across the United States and abroad.

Dr. Quist has served as Chorus Master for multiple professional orchestras. She has prepared choirs for Marin Alsop and Yannick Nezet-Seguin with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic, Daniel Harding and the Dresden Staatskapelle, and Spoleto Festival USA’s world premiere of the opera Matsukaze. Her choral preparations have been highly praised by the New York Times, Charleston City Paper, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and New York Classical Review. Under Quist’s direction regarding Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis, “The Philadelphia Symphonic Choir acquitted itself admirably in the fiendishly difficult music. The chorus’ energy never flagged in the great fugues, which conclude both the Gloria and the Credo. The latter, so fast and furious, that it left the audience breathless.” 

Dr. Quist was previously Chair of the Conducting, Organ, and Sacred Music Department, and Associate Professor of Conducting at Westminster Choir College. She is the recipient of Westminster Choir College of Rider University’s 2014 Distinguished Teaching Award, the 2018 Mazzotti Award for Women’s Leadership, and the Carol F. Spinelli Conducting Fellowship. Her ensemble, Westminster Kantorei, won first place in the 2018 American Prize for College & University Choral Performance, has performed at the American Choral Directors Association’s (ACDA) Eastern Division Conference, Boston Early Music Festival, American Handel Festival, and Interkultur. The choir released its first commercial recording in 2017, Lumina, distributed by Naxos. In her work with this early music ensemble, she collaborated regularly with Juilliard415, and many professional orchestras throughout the tri-state area. Dr. Quist was previously Director of the Westminster Vocal Institute, a summer program for talented high school students, and Director of Choral Activities at San José State University. 

Dr. Quist’s other honors include the James Mulholland National Choral Award and the Audrey Davidson Early Music Award. She regularly serves as a guest conductor, and she is invited to headline conferences and serve as a guest lecturer in the United States and abroad. A professional member of the GRAMMY recording academy, Quist recently served on the Choral GRAMMY Screening Committee for the 64th awards ceremony.

Dr. Quist’s recent publications include the forward to David Friddle’s Choral Treatises and Singing Societies in the Romantic Age, published by Lexington Books, 2022, an article in Choral Perspectives: Insights from American Choral Conductor-Teachers, ed. Brandon Williams and published by Hal Leonard, 2022, “Pedagogy of Choral Sound and Spirit” for the Choral Journal, 2021, and “Choral Resonance: Sound, Science, Spirit,” The Choral Conductor’s Companion, ed. Brian J. Winnie, GIA Publications, 2020. Quist has two Choral Series, through Walton Music and Gentry Publications.