Artistic Staff

Dr. Michael Braz - Artistic Director

Dr. Michael Braz
Michael Braz received his B.M. and M.M. degrees from the University of Miami, later completing a Ph.D. as a University Fellow at Florida State University. A keyboard soloist in England’s Haslemere Festival of Early Music, he has also soloed with numerous other orchestras, music festivals, and ensembles ranging from chamber music to jazz and rock.

In 1975, Braz premiered his original opera, Memoirs from the Holocaust, inspired by a visit to the Dachau concentration camp site. He has written orchestral/choral commissions for professional, collegiate, and school/community ensembles across the country, and was a recent recipient of an American Composers Forum/Rockefeller Brothers Fund “Faith Partners” grant. Currently, he has 17 published choral compositions and arrangements in print.

In his many years as a music educator, he has served as Associate Director of the Miami Choral Society, Conductor/Musical Director of the Boy Singers of Maine, and Founder/Director of Tallahassee’s Capitol Children’s Chorus and the Statesboro Youth Chorale.

In his 20th year at Georgia Southern University, Dr. Braz is a professor of music, teaching composition, orchestration, and analysis as well as courses on such subjects as Finale music software and Wagner's Ring Cycle. He is a book and music reviewer for various journals and publishers, and is in demand as a conductor, clinician, lecturer, and adjudicator.

His outside interests are comparative religions and trekking in the Nepal Himalaya. Most recently, he received the Ruffin Cup from the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences and the Statesboro Herald’s “Humanitarian of the Year” award at the 2003 Deen Day Smith ceremonies.