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Dedicated to sharing the sense of awe latent within music and committed to engaging listeners with its contemporary relevance, Brooklyn-based conductor Alison Norris currently serves as the Conducting Fellow for the Canton Symphony—a position they won in 2024 and that has since been renewed and expanded for the 2025/26 season. Internationally, Norris has been invited as a guest conductor with the China International Philharmonic Orchestra in Beijing and conducted the Orchestre Métropolitain as a conducting finalist with Yannick Nézet-Séguin in Domaine Forget de Charlevoix. Recent festival engagements include Tanglewood’s Conducting Seminar, where they were invited to premiere a new work by Maya Miro Johnson, and the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music as a Conducting Associate.

Always seeking to foster musical fascination alongside human compassion, in 2024 Norris organized a multidisciplinary benefit concert project entitled “Divinity and the Cosmos: A Genderqueer Exploration of Messiaen’s Turangalîla Symphonie”. They collaborated with five other transgender artists to create original films examining each movement of Messiaen’s preeminent work through a genderqueer lens: helping audiences navigate unfamiliar dissonances with the similarly enigmatic nature of trans joy. 

Norris’s conducting mentors include George Manahan, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Jim Ross, Cristian Măcelaru, and Oriol Sans. Alison holds a Professional Studies diploma from the Manhattan School of Music, a Masters of Music from UW-Madison, and a Bachelors of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Valparaiso University.