Michigan Muse Spring 2026 > New Faculty
New Faculty
Matthew Abernathy / Assistant Professor, Associate Director of Choirs / Department of Conducting
Matthew Abernathy (MM ’16) is a choral conductor and educator. He previously served as artistic director of the Master Chorale of Tampa Bay, the principal chorus for the Florida Orchestra. Abernathy also served as the music director of Minnesota Opera’s youth opera program Project Opera, as their Children’s Chorus director, and as guest chorus master. Abernathy was the director of choral studies at the University of Tampa, where he conducted Chamber Singers and Camerata, and he has been on the faculty at the University of St. Thomas and the University of Minnesota. He was named the 2024 Grand Prize winner of the MidAmerica Productions Inc. International Choral Conducting Competition. At U-M, Abernathy conducts the Men’s Glee Club and the University Choir and teaches conducting classes.
Heather Gilbert / Professor / Department of Theatre & Drama
Heather Gilbert is an award-winning lighting designer with robust Broadway experience and numerous regional, national, and international productions in her portfolio. She was nominated for the 2025 Tony Award for Best Lighting Design of a Play for the Broadway production of Good Night and Good Luck, and she also designed the new musical Dead Outlaw, which was nominated for Best Musical. Gilbert’s prior work includes the Tony Award-winning Broadway production of Parade, for which she was nominated for a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award. The Broadway production of The Sound Inside at Studio 54 earned her a Drama Desk Award, and the production was also a recipient of an Outer Critics Circle Award and a Tony Award nomination. Gilbert has been a recipient of the Michael Merritt Award for Excellence in Design Collaboration, the 3Arts Award in Chicago, and the NEA/TCG Career Development Grant for Designers from the Theatre Communications Group. She previously served on the faculty at Columbia College Chicago and Louisiana State University.
Stephanie Havey / Assistant Professor / Department of Voice & Opera
Stephanie Havey is an acclaimed stage director, producer, and educator who is recognized for her commitment to creating compelling, resonant storytelling. Her extensive professional portfolio includes directing and staging staff credits for many of the nation’s most distinguished opera companies and symphony orchestras. Havey is a passionate advocate for the creation and development of new operatic repertoire and served for three seasons as resident stage director for the North American New Opera Workshop. She also serves as artistic director of Finger Lakes Opera (FLO) in Rochester, New York. Since 2023, Havey has served as dramatic coach for the Houston Grand Opera Young Artist Vocal Academy and continues to be a guest director and instructor for some of the country’s most prestigious conservatories and professional training programs. She previously served as director of Opera Theater at Oberlin Conservatory of Music.
Valdis Jansons / Assistant Professor / Department of Voice & Opera
Valdis Jansons is a baritone, vocal educator, conductor, and stage director assistant. Since making his opera debut in 2002, Jansons has sung 65 roles in more than 70 theatres worldwide. He has won numerous international singing competitions and has performed worldwide in repertoire spanning early Mozart, contemporary opera, jazz, and musical theatre. As a chamber music interpreter, he has performed Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, Brahms’s Vier ernste Gesänge, Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death, and an extensive series of Neapolitan songs. As a conductor, Jansons has directed three choirs at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB): Lumina, Singing Gauchos, and Chamber Choir. As a stage director assistant, he worked in the UCSB production of Evan Mack’s opera Lucinda y las Flores de la Nochebuena.
Marie-Ève Piché / Assistant Professor / Department of Music Theory
Marie-Ève Piché is a music theorist whose primary research interests include chromaticism, 18th- and 19th-century music, late-tonal harmony, and historical perspectives on music theory and analysis. She has a specific interest in unusual and neglected harmonic progressions. Piché’s current projects include a study of sequences in Nikolai Medtner’s music, which features an abundance of atypical sequences that resist traditional classification, as well as research on chromatic wedge progressions in late-Romantic repertoires. She has presented her work at the annual meetings of the Society for Music Theory (SMT), the Canadian University Music Society (MusCan), Music Theory Midwest (MTMW), and the New England Conference of Music Theorists (NECMT). Piché previously taught music theory and aural skills at the Université de Montréal, McGill University, and the École de musique Vincent-d’Indy.
Alexis Riley / Assistant Professor / Department of Theatre & Drama
Alexis Riley is a performance artist, scholar, and educator. She most recently held a President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship at U-M. Riley specializes in theatre, dance, and performance studies; disability studies; and mad studies—a field of scholarship focused on the experience of mental illness. Her current book project, Mad Moves: Embodiment, Survivor Memory, Curative Performance, explores how performances created by people held at Oregon State Hospital from 1947 to the present memorialize institutionalized people across time. In addition to producing conventional scholarship, Riley also directs the Mad Memory Project, a multi-year performance series crafted in community with fellow disabled artists. She has presented these performances at numerous venues in the United States and abroad.
David Sears / Associate Professor / Department of Music Theory
David Sears specializes in the perception and cognition of musical traditions within and beyond the West, using the many methods of inference associated with the experimental and computational sciences. To date, his research has received financial support from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities and appears in venues related to music theory and analysis, experimental psychology, and music information retrieval. For his current project, Music Informatics for Radio Across the GlobE (MIRAGE), he developed an open-access database and accompanying online dashboard that allow researchers to access, interact with, and export information about music streamed on internet radio. Sears held a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Institute of Computational Perception at Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria, and he previously served on the faculty at Texas Tech University. At U-M, Sears directs the Music Cognition and Computation Lab (MCCL) and serves as editor-in-chief of Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal.
Kelli Smith-Biwer / Assistant Professor / Department of Musicology
Kelli Smith-Biwer’s work seeks to broaden the conversation around gender and audio technologies by leveraging her past work experience in IT and network engineering. Her current book project, The Hi-Fi Man: Masculinity, Modularity, and Home Audio in the US Midcentury, brings together methods from media, gender, and music studies to examine the masculinities represented and reproduced during the 1950s hi-fi boom in the United States. Smith-Biwer has published in the Journal of the Society for American Music and has a chapter forthcoming in the edited volume Instruments, Interfaces, Infrastructures: Thinking Across Musical Media (Oxford University Press). She has presented her work at both national and international conferences. Smith-Biwer won the 2018 Somers Award for Excellence in Teaching, received the 2019 James W. Pruett Summer Research Fellowship, and was the inaugural UNC Arts Everywhere Music Technology Fellow. She previously taught at the Ohio University School of Music.
Julie Zhu / Assistant Professor / Department of Performing Arts Technology
Julie Zhu is a composer, artist, and carillonist who most recently held a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship at U-M. Her work is conceptual and transdisciplinary, and her research interests include the creative and ethical use of AI and machine learning in the arts. As an advocate for intermedia composition, Zhu collaborates with artists and musicians globally. The results of these collaborations have been exhibited at and performed in studios and residencies throughout Europe, North America, and Asia. As a carillonist, Zhu regularly performs on the Baird Carillon in the Burton Memorial Tower and the Lurie Carillon at the University of Michigan and concertizes in the summer. During her time as a visual artist in New York City, she was the resident carillonneur at Saint Thomas Church Fifth Avenue.