Dr. Matt Hill is Assistant Professor and Director of Choral Activities at Creighton University, where he conducts the university’s choral ensembles, teaches Music History, Conducting, and other music coursework, and oversees the artistic and academic life of the choral program. He joined the Creighton faculty in 2023, drawn by the University’s Jesuit mission and its conviction that education is the formation of the whole person—mind, voice, and spirit alike. In the choral room, that conviction becomes audible: Dr. Hill builds ensembles in which musical excellence and human dignity reinforce rather than compete with one another.

At the center of his teaching is a commitment he summarizes in three phrases: Passionate Musicianship, Artistic Excellence, People First. He approaches rehearsal as a place of formation rather than mere preparation, conceiving of ensemble work as “corporate voice lessons” in which singers build healthy, expressive technique together rather than simply learning notes. His pedagogy is rooted in the bel canto tradition and the vocal science of Richard Miller and Berton Coffin, and he is known for cultivating a choral sound that is at once technically secure and deeply expressive. For Dr. Hill, the discipline of singing well is inseparable from care for the people who sing—an approach that resonates with the Ignatian ideal of cura personalis, attention to the whole person. Students describe a rehearsal environment that is rigorous and joyful in equal measure, where high standards and genuine care are understood to be the same thing.

Beyond the university, Dr. Hill is the founder and Executive and Artistic Director of Sing Omaha, a nonprofit community choral organization he established in 2007. Under his leadership, Sing Omaha has grown into one of the region’s most significant musical institutions, encompassing nine ensembles, with two studio locations for private lessons and camps, serving more than 500 musicians each year. The organization embodies his belief that excellent choral music belongs not only to the academy or the concert hall but to the community as a whole, and that singing is among the most direct ways a city can discover and raise its collective voice. The work of Sing Omaha and the work of his classroom are, for him, a single vocation expressed in different rooms.

Dr. Hill is also an active composer, with nineteen published compositions as of 2026. His compositional process begins with text. He is especially drawn to the poetry of Sara Teasdale and Emily Dickinson, allowing the rhythm, imagery, and interior life of the words to shape musical form. Among his notable works are Gloria, Magnificat, Sweetest Music Softly Stealing, and Night, the last of which was commissioned by the Nebraska Choral Directors Association in 2025. His writing balances lyric warmth with structural clarity, and his music has entered the repertoires of school, community, and church choirs across the country. He was accepted into the auditioned track of the 2026 International Choral Composers Institute in Charlotte, North Carolina, where he completed and premiered a new choral work. As both conductor and composer, he brings to the podium an intimate, firsthand understanding of how a score is built and how it lives in the voices of singers.

Dr. Hill holds the Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Choral Conducting, and his development as a musician owes much to a long-standing and formative association with the composer and conductor Z. Randall Stroope. As an undergraduate, he studied with Stroope for five years—training that spanned voice, conducting, and composition—and served as the composer’s copyist and engraver. After a five-year interval, he returned to earn his master’s degree under Stroope’s direction at Oklahoma State University, where Dr. Michael Trotta—a fellow Stroope protégé—also served on the faculty; his master’s thesis examined the music of Norwegian-American composer Ola Gjeilo. His doctoral research again centered on Stroope, resulting in his 2019 dissertation, The Life and Career of Z. Randall Stroope: With a Special Focus on Hodie. That mentorship continues to shape his artistic sensibility.

His ensembles have welcomed a number of today’s leading choral composers as guest artists, including Stroope himself (twice), Jackson Berkey, Michael Trotta, and Ola Gjeilo. These relationships reflect a career spent in close engagement with living composers, carrying their craft into his own classroom and creative work, and they inform a teaching philosophy that treats contemporary repertoire and the artists who create it as central to a singer’s education.

His contributions to the field have earned wide recognition. He has twice been named Choral Director of the Year by the Nebraska Choral Directors Association and was nominated for the Grammy Music Educator Award. He was honored as Faculty Member of the Year during his tenure at Peru State College, and his commentary on the choral field—including the persistent shortage of tenor voices in American choirs—was cited internationally in The Economist (2026).

Before joining Creighton, Dr. Hill served from 2014 to 2023 as Associate Professor and Music Department Lead at Peru State College, where he held tenure. His decision to leave a tenured appointment to join Creighton’s mission-driven community reflects a deliberate commitment to the values that animate Jesuit education—and to the conviction, expressed in the Ignatian ideal of magis, that one should continually seek the greater good. That choice has become a defining thread of his work at Creighton, where he sees the choral program as a place to nurture not only fine musicians, but thoughtful people prepared to be of service to others.

In addition to his academic and artistic appointments, Dr. Hill is deeply engaged in the leadership of his profession. He currently serves as Executive Director of the Nebraska Choral Directors Association and as Director of Worship Arts at Divine Shepherd Lutheran Church, where he leads music ministry for an active worshiping congregation. He is also completing a term on the national board of the American Choral Directors Association (2021–2027). His service reflects a lifelong understanding of music as something offered in and for community—whether the gathered congregation, the concert audience, or the singers themselves. Through professional leadership, worship ministry, and the mentorship of younger conductors, he works to strengthen the choral art at the local, state, regional, and national levels.

Dr. Hill lives in the Omaha area with his wife, Jen, and their son, Walter. He continues to compose, conduct, and teach with the same purpose that has guided his career from the beginning: to form passionate musicians, to pursue artistic excellence without compromise, and to put people first.