HUMANIZING LEADERSHIP
Bio
Argentine conductor Andrea Pérez Mukdsi is Music Director of the GaTech Concert Orchestra (USA) and Ensemble WARMI (Argentina). Having received much of her training in Italy with Piero Bellugi, Gianluigi Gelmetti, and Bruno D’Astoli, Pérez Mukdsi is also passionate about opera and Italian repertoire. She has been fortunate to develop avenues for maintaining a two-pronged career—both as a conductor and as an educator—in various countries around the world. A permanent full-time faculty at GSU, she currently teaches Latin American Music and a graduate seminar on Music and Gender in Latin America.
Pérez Mukdsi has guest conducted many orchestras throughout the United States, including the New York Chamber Virtuosi, Manhattan Youth Orchestra, Kansas State University Symphony Orchestra, and Percussion Ensemble. Other engagements have been with the Puebla Symphony Orchestra (Mexico), Salta Symphony Orchestra and Bahia Blanca Symphony (Argentina), and Florence Symphonietta Orchestra (Italy).
As a champion of twentieth and twenty-first century music, Pérez Mukdsi creates concert experiences that bring contemporary music to new audiences. These endeavors range from conversational concerts to multimedia performances and include collaborations of all kinds across countries. One of her most adventurous creations was the Sonoridade das Mulheres Latino-Americanas (2023), a music collaboration between the Salta Symphony (Argentina), Ensemble WARMI, and the University of Sao Paulo and University of Río de Janeiro (Brazil). This transnational, multilingual, and cross-generational initiative – a series of concerts and panels to foster and connect living women composers – received national recognition and redefined the contemporary music scene of the region.
Maestra Pérez Mukdsi is the founder of The Latin American Women Composers Project, initiative focused on commissioning, preserving, and promoting contemporary Latin American women composers. This organization that connects musicians, conductors, and librarians with composers and their music.
Most recently, Pérez Mukdsi created the Latin American Women Composers Series, a collaboration between GaTech Orchestras, GSU Center for Latin American Studies, University of North Georgia, and the Argentine Consulate, which features Argentinian women performers and academic works by women composers from the Caribbean and the Southern Cone. In addition, with Ensemble WARMI, she completed the recording of premières by Nora Ponte (Argentina), Diana Arismendi (Venezuela), Alba Potes (Colombia), Marisa Rezende (Brazil), and Marta Lambertini (Argentina), in collaboration with the INAMU (National Institute for Music, Argentina). Pérez Mukdsi has presented this repertoire at the Festival Latinoamericano de música (Caracas, 2022) and the Foro de compositores del Caribe (PR, 2024).
Pérez Mukdsi’s special interest in contemporary music has led to her world premières by composers such as Nora Ponte and Diana Arismendi, as well as the U.S. or regional premiers of works by Nadia Boulanger, Astor Piazzolla, Claudia Montero, Edgard Varèse, Cecilia Villanueva, and Amadeo Roldán.
Pérez Mukdsi has worked with teachers like Charles Dutoit, Riccardo Chailly, Jean Fournet, Guillermo Scarabino, Néstor Zadoff, and Guillermo Opitz. She holds Doctor of Musical Arts and Masters degrees in orchestral and choral conducting from the Argentine Catholic University, a Masters in Conducting from Kansas State University, a Ph.D in Latin American Cultural Studies and Master in Cognitive Linguistics from SUNY Buffalo.
Pérez Mukdsi’s research is situated at the intersection of sound, gender studies, and social processes in the Americas after the second half of the 20th century. Her work in Latin American sonic studies conceives the contemporary production written by women in Latin America as polysemic spaces of resistance to various hegemonic structures in the region. Additionally, her analysis of contemporary Latin American repertoire reveals the dialectic of negotiation with “the other” that transcends geographical and cultural boundaries.
