About this Artist
Recently appointed as Assistant Conductor to the Brazilian Symphony Orchestra and winner of the Solti Foundation U.S. 2014 Career Assistance Award, Lee Mills is internationally recognized as a passionate, multifaceted, and energetic conductor. He has led performances with the Brazilian Symphony Orchestra that have been hailed as having a “sonority of unequalled liveliness and quality,” working alongside such artists as Simone Porter, Conrad Tao, Eliane Coelho, and the Smetana Trio. His recent conducting engagements outside of the Brazilian Symphony Orchestra include the São Paulo State Symphony Orchestra, the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the Gran Teatro La Fenice, Bozeman Symphony Orchestra, and Concert Artists of Baltimore with the Moscow Ballet.
In the summer of 2014, Mr. Mills was selected by David Robertson and Carnegie hall to be the Assistant Conductor of the National Youth Orchestra of the United States of America, which he conducted in rehearsals and in concert on the orchestra’s national tour. At the invitation of Baltimore Symphony Orchestra Music Director Marin Alsop, he received the prestigious BSO-Peabody Institute Conducting Fellowship in 2011.
Mr. Mills has served as cover conductor for the symphony orchestras of Atlanta, Charlotte, and Baltimore; the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and was assistant and rehearsal conductor in 2013 at the Gran Teatro La Fenice in Venice, Italy for productions of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni, and Così fan tutte.
He conducted alongside Maestro David Robertson in the highly acclaimed U.S. Premiere of John Cage’s Thirty Pieces for Five Orchestras with the Saint Louis Symphony. In 2012, Mr. Mills was selected by Aldeburgh Music to serve as Conducting Fellow for the Britten Pears Orchestra; that same year, he was also invited from out of 400 applicants to participate in the highly selective Sir Georg Solti International Conducting Competition in Frankfurt, Germany, where he conducted and worked with the Alte Oper Frankfurt Orchestra.
Under the tutelage of Gustav Meier and Marin Alsop, Mr. Mills received his Graduate Performance Diploma and Artist’s Diploma in Orchestral Conducting at the Peabody Institute. He has been a conducting fellow at the prestigious American Academy of Conducting at Aspen during the summers of 2012 and 2013, where he worked closely with Robert Spano, Hugh Wolff, and Larry Rachleff. Mr. Mills graduated cum laude from Whitman College, where he began his conducting studies with Robert Bode. Additionally, he has studied with Edward Polochick and Matthew Savery.