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About

Jefferson Todd Frazier is a composer, educator and non-profit leader, with 17 years of professional executive level arts administration, development, management and strategic planning experience in Houston, TX.

Mr. Frazier is the Executive Director of Young Audiences of Houston (YAH), one of 31 independent U.S. chapters of Young Audiences, Inc. Founded in 1956 by violinist Fredel Lack with support from Ms. Ima Hogg and Mrs. William P. Hobby, the mission of YAH is to educate and inspire children through the fine arts. In its most recently completed season alone, YAH’s roster of 64 professional artists, representing all fine arts disciplines, brought the arts and culture to more than 335,000 K-12 children through over 2,000 high quality performances, workshops, and residences in school and community sites throughout the greater Houston area.

In addition, Mr. Frazier serves as Managing Director for The Center for Performing Arts Medicine (CPAM) at Methodist Hospital. CPAM is the nation’s most comprehensive group of medical professionals, based in the world-renowned Texas Medical Center, teamed to provide preventive, diagnostic, specialty and emergency care to performing artists. Complementing its healthcare service, CPAM also curates and presents professional arts programs through concerts, workshops and gallery exhibits at the Methodist Hospital open to the public as well as supports innovative research projects that explore the various uses of the arts in relationship to improved human performance, cognitive development, rehabilitation and therapy.

Frazier’s primary accomplishment to date in the field or arts education is the Founding of American Festival for the Arts (AFA), where he served for 15 years as Executive Director and trained the organizations next era of executive staff. AFA was established in 1993 to safeguard the availability of high quality music education and performance opportunities for youth and to broaden the audience for American works and the standard classical music literature. Its primary project, the AFA Summer Music Conservatory, which employs 75 of the regions finest music educators and trains over 300 promising Southeast Texas K-12 students each summer, offers a broad and innovative curriculum of advanced musical training and performance with orchestra/chamber music, jazz, chorus, composition, theory/history, private lesson and elective divisions at campuses in Houston and Beaumont, Texas.

As a composer, Frazier has written extensively for choral and instrumental ensembles throughout North and South America and is presently at work on a large-scale oratorio based on the life of Thomas Jefferson and orchestrating his opera, “Breath of Life,” in preparation for its Premiere by the Hardin Simmons University Opera Department in November 2010. He is a graduate of the Wilhelm Schole, River Oaks Baptist School and the Episcopal High School in Houston, TX and received his undergraduate and graduate level music composition and pedagogy training from The Eastman School of Music in Rochester, NY, and The Juilliard School in New York, NY where his major teachers included American composers David Diamond and Samuel Adler. On the occasion of the Juilliard School’s 100th anniversary in 2006, Frazier was recognized as one of 100 distinguished alumni and profiled in the Juilliard Journal’s “A Quiet Revolution: Juilliard Alumni and The Transformation of Education in America Through the Arts.

He has been honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Houston Arts Alliance, American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, Texas Music Teachers Association, Texas Junior Chamber of Commerce, The Juilliard and Eastman Schools of Music, and most recently, as a recipient of the 2009 Ovation Award from the Houston Grand Opera. He serves as a Director of the Texas Lyceum and on the Advisory Boards of the Texas Medical Center’s National Center for Human Performance, Wilhelm Schole International Foundation, Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, ArtReach, the Texas-French Alliance for the Arts, the River Oaks Chamber Orchestra, is a Fellow of the US-Japan Foundation’s Leadership Program and recently served as a member of the Texas Commission on the Arts Grant Review Panel and Houston Independent School District Foundation’s Leadership Council for the Fine Arts.

Frazier is a 6th generation Texan and is proud of his wife Jennifer, son Mac, daughter Kenzie, and his Merriman, Frazier, Bryant and McReynolds Clans.