Originally from Fairbanks, Alaska, Cayenna Ponchione-Bailey is a UK-based conductor committed to promoting social justice and environmental sustainability within and through orchestral music. Cayenna serves as the Associate Conductor of the Orchestra of St John’s, Director of Performance at St Catherine’s College, University of Oxford, and is the Director of Research for the Oxford Conducting Institute. She holds masters’ degrees in orchestral conducting and percussion performance, and wrote her doctoral thesis on the social psychology of orchestral musicians’ interactions and decision-making at the University of Oxford, where she is currently a postdoctoral researcher on the AHRC-funded research project Transforming 19th-Century Historically Informed Practice. Cayenna has recently been awarded a 3-year Leverhulme postdoctoral research fellowship to begin in March 2021 at the University of Sheffield.
