Music Department Faculty

Anna Wittstruck joined the Department of Music at Boston College in Fall 2023 as Associate Professor of the Practice, Director of the Boston College Symphony Orchestra. At Boston College, she conducts the BCSO, teaches music history, directs instrumental chamber music, and oversees applied instrumental studies within the Department of Music. Prior to her appointment at Boston College, she spent six years teaching at University of Puget Sound’s School of Music, serving as Assistant Professor and Director of Orchestra, and two years as Acting Assistant Professor at Stanford University, serving as Interim Music Director and Conductor of the Stanford Symphony Orchestra and Stanford Philharmonia. She has also directed the Federal Way Youth Symphonies, served on the faculty of the Sitka Fine Arts Camp in Sitka, Alaska, and from 2019 until 2023 conducted the West Seattle Symphony Orchestra. 

Wittstruck has conducted concerts across the United States, in Latin America, Europe and in Asia. She conducted concerts at Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City and Teatro Nacional de Cuba in Havana, where she performed with Lizt Alfonso Dance Cuba and the Chamber Orchestra of Havana. She has conducted concerts at the Rudolfinum in Prague and the Musikzentrum Augarten (home of the Vienna Boys’ Choir) in Vienna, as well as concerts in Berlin, Bad Elster, and Teplice. She has served as a guest conductor with the Harbin Symphony in China, the Northwest Sinfonietta, the Federal Way Symphony, and the Eastern Sierra Symphony, as well as the orchestra programs at Pacific Lutheran University and Whitman College. In 2023 she was named the national winner of the American Prize in Orchestral Conducting, and national finalist for the Ernst Bacon Memorial Award for the Performance of American Music (university/college orchestra divisions). 

Wittstruck is also an active orchestral musician whose performances as a cellist span from the Beijing Modern Music Festival to the 2011 YouTube Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Michael Tilson Thomas. Her string quartet gave a concert tour of Thailand sponsored by the Yonok and American-Thai Foundations, in honor of HRH Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn’s sixtieth birthday celebrations. She won a blind audition at the age of fourteen to become the youngest contracted member of the Asheville Symphony Orchestra, and has participated in orchestra festivals at Tanglewood, Round Top, and the National Symphony/Kennedy Center Institute. She has appeared as a soloist with the Charlotte and Hendersonville Symphonies, the Stanford Symphony Orchestra, and on the Public Radio International show, “From the Top.”

She received her Bachelor of Arts in Music from Princeton University with certificates in orchestral conducting and creative writing, and her PhD in musicology from Stanford University. While a graduate student, she conducted the Summer Stanford Symphony Orchestra and directed the Stanford Wind Symphony, the Stanford New Ensemble, and the Stanford Chinese Ensemble. She also helped create the Stanford Youth Orchestra, an international program for advanced high school students, and taught courses through Stanford Pre-Collegiate Studies. At Princeton, she spent two years as Assistant Conductor of the Princeton University Orchestra and as Associate Conductor of the Princeton Sinfonia.

Wittstruck has attended the Pierre Monteux School of Conducting in Hancock, Maine, where she studied with Michael Jinbo, and the Conductor’s Retreat at Medomak, where she studied with Kenneth Kiesler. Other conducting teachers include Michael Pratt, Ruth Ochs, Stephen Sano, Jindong Cai, and Edwin Outwater.