Meredith Bowen was recently appointed Associate Director of the Virginia Governor’s School for the Visual and Performing Arts and Humanities. She also serves as the Director of Choral Activities and Associate Professor of Music at Radford University, where she teaches choral pedagogy classes for undergraduates and graduates, conducts three ensembles, and mentors pre-service conductor-teachers. Her current scholarship interests include restoring, publishing, and performing music written by 17th-century women and the impact of socially conscious programming and pedagogy.
Previous to her appointment at Radford, Bowen taught K-12 general music, choir, and band in Lansing, MI, and was the Artistic Director of multiple ensembles in Michigan, including Sistrum - Lansing Women’s Chorus, Holland Chorale, and the Battle Creek Girls Chorus. As Artistic Director of the community choruses, she spearheaded projects such as professional recordings, commissioning and premiering new music, community-wide performances for a cause, and performance tours to San Jose, Denver, Chicago, France, and Cuba. Under her leadership, The Holland Chorale was selected to perform at the Michigan American Directors Association conference; Sistrum was invited to perform for the American Guild of Organists conference, and the Battle Creek Girls Chorus won a silver medal at the World Choir Games in Cincinnati.
Since her tenure at Radford, Bowen’s teaching has included social justice-themed concerts, including: “Please Stay: Your Story is not Over,” a concert about suicide awareness and prevention; “Journey & Refuge: We Can Mend the Sky,” a collaboration concert featuring our Opera Workshop singers in Amahl and the Night Visitors and mass choir in Jake Runestad’s “We Can Mend the Sky” as a fundraiser for the Blacksburg Refugee Partnership; “We Shall Overcome” an exploration of the history of protest music focused explicitly on the civil rights era and connecting that music and movement to the Black Lives Matter events in 2020; and “For the Sake of Our Children,” a plea to end gun violence. In 2018, Bowen won a commissioning grant from the American Choral Directors Diverse Voices Collaborative Grant to create a three-movement work for treble choruses. She premiered the work at Carnegie Hall with forty Radford students, hosted the composer for a professional development weekend in Michigan, and professionally recorded it with the women’s choral collective in which she sings mirabai.
Bowen enjoys an active guest conducting, adjudicating, and clinician schedule, is an inaugural singer of and Artistic Administrator for mirabai, a professional women’s ensemble, serves as President for the Virginia chapter of the American Choral Directors Association, and serves on the Choral Advisory Council of the Institute for Composer Diversity. She has published a journal article, six scholarly musical editions, and contributed four submissions to a choral literature resource about women composers. Boosey & Hawkes, Morningstar, and MusicSpoke publish her historical choral music editions by women.
Bowen holds a B.S. in Music Education from West Chester University, an M.M. and a D.M.A. in Choral Conducting from Michigan State University.