Chris David Westover-Muñoz

An award-winning conductor/creator, Chris David Westover-Muñoz has conducted and curated programs for wind ensembles and orchestras nationally and internationally. In 2019, he was First Prize winner of the Warsaw Wind Ensemble Conducting Competition. Since then, he has appeared frequently as a guest conductor and teacher at various conservatories in Poland. His work has been praised by composers, including Augusta Read Thomas, who called his work “elegant, bold, vibrant, inspiring, and centered,” Daniel Bernard Roumain, and Aleksander Lasoń, who lauded Westover-Muñoz’s revival of his first symphony.

He is associate professor of music at Denison University and Music Director of the Newton Mid-Kansas Symphony Orchestra.

Westover-Muñoz has been lauded for his groundbreaking curatorial and genre-bending performances with the Denison University Wind Ensemble. In recent years, he has built strong relationships with ensembles in Poland, including the Orkiestra Dęta at the Akademia Muzyczna im. Krzysztof Pendereckiego and the distinguished Beethoven Academy Orchestra. In 2024 he made his debut at the Szymanowski Philharmonic Hall in Kraków, and in 2025 will make his debut at the Krzysztof Penderecki European Centre for Music in Lusławice (PL). His performances in Poland have been notable for the Polish premieres of works by Reich, Stravinsky, and Persichetti, along with his rediscovery of Aleksander Lasoń’s Symfonia 1.

Prior to his current appointment at Denison, Dr. Westover-Muñoz led wind ensembles, orchestras and operatic performances at Bethel College (KS), the University of Oklahoma, and the Meadows School of the Arts at SMU. He has received acclaim for his performances with educational and professional ensembles in the US and abroad. Since 2017 he has been a frequent winner of the American Prize for Conducting in the choral, orchestral, and wind ensemble divisions.

He has presented his research internationally, including many conferences of CBDNA and IGEB. This includes work on Persichetti, Beethoven, Julius Gerold, music of the IWW, and the wind-band as a social/aesthetic practice. His reenactment of early IWW performance practice, Starvation Army: Band Music No. 1, was released by PM Press and is available on all streaming platforms. Westover-Muñoz serves on the advisory board of IGEB and is a jury member of the Warsaw Wind-Band Conducting Competition.

He holds a Doctor of Musical Arts in Orchestral Conducting from the University of Oklahoma and a Master of Music in Wind Conducting from the Meadows School of the Arts at SMU.