Profile

Ryan Murray is the Director of Orchestra & Opera at California State University, Sacramento, as well as the Artistic Director of Music in the Mountains and the Principal Pops Conductor of the Modesto Symphony. He is also the Music Director and Conductor for the Auburn Symphony, and the conductor for the Sacramento Youth Symphony’s premier orchestra.  An award-winning opera conductor, Ryan is currently the Music Director of Opera Modesto. He has served as assistant conductor for opera productions at the Sacramento Philharmonic and is the past Music Director of Fresno Grand Opera.

Ryan is a past winner of the Vienna Philharmonic’s prestigious Ansbacher Fellowship for Young Conductors and spent the summer in residence at the 2014 Salzburg Festival. Ryan was awarded second place in the 2019 American Prize for Professional Orchestral Conducting, and has garnered national recognition for his dynamic, compelling performances of contemporary opera as the winner of the 2017 American Prize in Opera Conducting.

With an enthusiasm for film scores, Ryan enjoys the unique challenges of conducting movies in concert and was recently added to the Disney & ICM Approved Conductors list.  Recent and upcoming performances include Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Pixar Animation Studios' Pixar in Concert, and Star Wars: A New Hope.

Ryan holds degrees, summa cum laude, in Bassoon and Voice Performance from CSU Sacramento and holds a master’s degree, with distinction, in Music Business from the Berklee College of Music. Ryan has previously attended the Cabrillo Festival’s Conductors Workshop and was one of just eight conductors worldwide to be invited to the Musiikin aika Masterclass in Finland. He previously attended the Contemporary Music Symposium led by Alan Gilbert featuring the New York Philharmonic, the Aurora Chamber Festival in Sweden, the Lucerne Festival’s Conducting Masterclass in Switzerland, and the Eastman School of Music’s Summer Conducting Institute.