David Bloom (he/him) is a conductor equally at home in orchestral repertoire, opera, and new music, noted for his “dazzling precision and grace” (San Francisco Chronicle), “intelligence, elegance, and passion” (Opera News), “ferocious and focused” (The New York Times) performances, and “breathtaking and inspired programming” (Shepherd Express). He dedicates his work to collaborating with artists and communities to inspire creativity, empathy, and joy.

In the 2023-2024 season, his orchestral repertoire includes music by Beethoven, Elgar, Florence Price, and Tchaikovsky, along with a premiere by Caroline Shaw. He is founding Co-Artistic Director of Contemporaneous, a 23-member New York-based ensemble he co-founded in 2010, and has been Co-Artistic Director of Present Music, Milwaukee’s long-running new music ensemble since 2019. In 2023, he became Artistic Director of New York’s Queer Urban Orchestra and Principal Conductor of the orchestras at New York University, where he also teaches conducting.

In such venues as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Walt Disney Concert Hall, MoMA, and Park Avenue Armory, Bloom has been a guest conductor for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, American Composers Orchestra, Bang on a Can All-Stars, Jacaranda, The Crossing, NOW Ensemble, Ensemble Connect, Choir of Trinity Wall Street, and Kronos Quartet and worked with soloists Dashon Burton, David Byrne, Helga Davis, Isabel Leonard, Iarla Ó Lionáird, Courtney Love, Hila Plitmann, Dawn Upshaw, and many more. As a cover conductor for the New York Philharmonic, he has worked with such conductors as Susanna Mälkki, Santu-Matias Rouvali, and Dalia Stasevska and soloists Brandford Marsalis, Anthony McGill, and Golda Schultz.

Especially active as an opera conductor, among the productions Bloom has led are Don Giovanni with Teatro Grattacielo, Philip Glass’ Les enfants terribles for Opera Omaha, Michael Gordon’s Acquanetta and Jeremy Schonfeld’s Iron & Coal for Beth Morrison Projects, Kamala Shankaram’s Miranda in virtual reality for Tri-Cities Opera and Opera Omaha, Idomeneo for NYU Opera, Dido and Aeneas for Kaufman Music Center, Judd Greenstein’s A Marvelous Order, Matt Marks’ Mata Hari for PROTOTYPE Festival, and numerous productions for the American Opera Project, Opera on Tap, and Experiments in Opera, for whom he conducted Everything for Dawn, an opera by 10 composers created as a 10-episode TV series currently streaming on the Opera Philadelphia Channel. He has premiered over 30 operas, including the orchestral version of Glass’ La Belle et la Bête with Jean Cocteau’s 1946 film.

He has conducted over 400 world premieres and collaborated with such composers as Donnacha Dennehy, Du Yun, inti figgis-vizueta, Michael Gordon, Judd Greenstein, Nathalie Joachim, David Lang, Tania León, Andrew Norman, Emma O’Halloran, and Julia Wolfe. In 2023, he conducted the premiere of Dylan Mattingly’s six-hour opera Stranger Love at Disney Concert Hall, a performance lauded as “exact and detailed, but also lively and openly dancing” (The New York Times). In 2021, he conducted Present Music in the world premiere of Raven Chacon’s Voiceless Mass, which went on to win the 2022 Pulitzer Prize.

Bloom has served as an artistic advisor for activist orchestra The Dream Unfinished since the organization’s founding in 2015. He taught at Kaufman Music Center for eight years, serving as conductor of new music youth orchestra Face the Music and launching the orchestra program at the Center’s public high school, Special Music School. He has been a clinician for Carnegie Hall’s Music Educators Workshop and led residencies at such institutions as Princeton University, Mannes School of Music, City University of New York, Williams College, and his alma mater, Bard College.

He has recorded for Sony Masterworks, Cantaloupe, New Amsterdam, Innova, New Focus, Starkland, Kairos, and Navona and was co-host of the Contemporaneous podcast Imagination Radio. Also known as a “vividly creative arranger” (Shepherd Express), Bloom has created over 30 arrangements for a variety of forces, including music by Eve Beglarian, Julius Eastman, Alma Mahler-Werfel, Alhaji Bai Konte, Henry Threadgill, and songs by Gladys Knight and En Vogue for Up Until Now Collective’s performances in American Sign Language.