Ingrid Martin puts people at the heart of every musical experience. Her work as a conductor and teacher is shaped by a career spanning music, medicine, and education.

In 2025, Martin joins the Detroit Symphony Orchestra as Assistant Conductor and Phillip and Lauren Fisher Community Ambassador. She also debuts with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and Orchestra Victoria and leads the Louise Crossley Conductor Training Program for the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra. She returns to conduct the Auckland Philharmonia, Christchurch Symphony Orchestra, Queensland Symphony Orchestra, and Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, following her 2024 tenure as New Zealand Assistant Conductor in Residence.

Martin loves championing new repertoire and bringing audiences closer to music through thoughtfully curated experiences. She has commissioned 15 works for youth orchestras, conducted 20 world premieres, and recorded over 50 student compositions. Through her original orchestral shows, Martin invites audiences of all ages to explore unexpected connections between music and other disciplines, from physics to painting.

Martin was the first Australian admitted to the Taki Alsop Conducting Fellowship Mentoring Program (2024–2025). She was also a fellow of the Australian Conducting Academy (2023–2024) and the Carlos Miguel Prieto Conducting Fellowship with the Orchestra of the Americas (2022).

Before pursuing conducting professionally, Martin worked for a decade in emergency medicine then retrained as a teacher. Her approach to music and leadership is deeply informed by the skills she developed in these careers: listening closely, thinking clearly under pressure, and communicating complex ideas.

Martin has built a global following for Conducting Artistry, her platform for practical resources, podcasts, books, and online tools that empower teachers and students to deepen their artistry. She is a sought-after speaker and clinician at international music education conferences including the Midwest Clinic and Texas Music Educators’ Association, and her book Planning Effective Rehearsals is required reading for university music education programs worldwide.

At home, she’s rarely far from a craft project and a strong black coffee.

2023 Pulitzer Prize-winning and Emmy- and GRAMMY-nominated composer Michael Abels is best known for his genre-defying scores for the Jordan Peele films Get Out, Us, and Nope. The score for Us won a World Soundtrack Award, the Jerry Goldsmith Award, a Critics Choice nomination, and multiple critics awards, and was named “Score of the Decade” by The Wrap. Both Us and Nope were shortlisted for the Academy Award for Best Original Score. In 2022, Abels’s music was honored by the Vancouver International Film Festival, the Middleburg Film Festival, and the Museum of the Moving Image. Nope was awarded Best Score for a Studio Film by the Society of Composers & Lyricists. Other recent projects include the films Bad Education, Nightbooks, and the docu-series Allen v. Farrow. Current releases include Chevalier (Toronto International Film Festival) and Landscape with Invisible Hand (Sundance 2022), his second collaboration with director Cory Finley. Upcoming projects include The Burial (Amazon), and a series for Disney Plus.

Abels’s creative output also includes many concert works, including the choral song cycle At War With Ourselves for the Kronos Quartet, the GRAMMY-nominated Isolation Variation for Hilary Hahn, and Omar, an opera co-composed with GRAMMY-winning recording artist Rhiannon Giddens. The New York Times named Omar one of the 10 Best Classical Performances of 2022 and said, “What Giddens and Abels created is an ideal of American sound, an inheritor of the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess but more honest to its subject matter, conjuring folk music, spirituals, Islamic prayer and more, woven together with a compelling true story that transcends documentary.”

Abels’s other concert works have been performed by the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony, the Los Angeles Master Chorale, and many others. Some of these pieces are available on the Cedille label, including Delights & Dances, Global Warming, and Winged Creatures. Recent commissions include Emerge for the National Symphony and Detroit Symphony Orchestra, and a guitar concerto Borders for GRAMMY-nominated artist Mak Grgic.

Abels is co-founder of the Composers Diversity Collective, an advocacy group to increase visibility of composers of color in film, gaming, and streaming media.