Conor Smyth-Small is a doctoral student at The Ohio State University, working with Professor Caroline Hong. Originally from County Down, Northern Ireland, Conor’s classical repertory interests lie in the late-romantic, twentieth-century and contemporary eras. During the summer of 2023, Conor attended Cortona Sessions for New Music where he worked closely with faculty, performers and composers in the Tuscan town of Cortona, Italy. For his master’s degree recital, Conor commissioned a work for piano and electronics by fellow queer musician and composer Deanna Rusnock.

As a pedagogue, Conor has ample teaching experience, most recently having worked as a teaching assistant at Arizona State University for four semesters. Here, he taught class piano as the sole instructor to music majors and non-music majors of all levels. When previously living in Ireland, Conor taught at the Ulster College of Music as a piano and theory instructor for several years before relocating to the U.S. to pursue graduate studies. During this time, Conor also worked as an accompanist and repetiteur at Queen’s University Belfast and taught elementary group piano classes at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. Outside of performance, Conor also has a keen interest in ethnomusicology, specifically in music and gender studies, and recently undertook research exploring gender disparity in the popular music genre, K-pop.