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Dean Southern

baritone, has performed in opera, oratorio and recital throughout the United States and Europe, including Carnegie Hall's Weill Recital Hall in New York, Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and the Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto, Italy. He was an Apprentice Artist with Santa Fe Opera, for whom he appeared on two concert tours of the Southwest.

His students have been accepted to prestigious young artist programs and graduate schools and awarded the Fulbright grant, and they have gone on to successful careers as performers and voice teachers. He regularly gives master classes at universities and conservatories in the US and abroad, including the Kungliga Musikhögskolan (Royal College of Music) in Stockholm (Sweden), the Conservatorio Profesional de Música in Valencia (Spain) and the Interlochen Arts Academy (Michigan).

Dr. Southern is the author of the “Distant Voices” column in Classical Singer magazine. The magazine has also published his articles “Practicing 101: Ten Tips for Making the Most of Your Time between Lessons” and the three-part series “Distant Voices: Listening to Singers of the Past.” He frequently presents “Distant Voices: Listening to Singers of the Past”—a multimedia guided tour through the first half-century of recorded vocal history—at colleges, universities, and arts organizations across the country.

After graduating from Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, he earned master’s degrees in piano performance from the University of Missouri as a student of Jane Allen and in voice performance from the University of Akron as a student of Clifford Billions. He holds the Doctor of Musical Arts degree in voice performance at the Cleveland Institute of Music, where he studied with Mary Schiller.

Since 2004, he has spent his summers on the faculty of the American Institute of Musical Studies in Graz, Austria, where he teaches voice and gives a series of lectures on historic singers. From 2008 to 2012, he taught voice and served as stage director of  opera at the University of Miami Frost School of Music in Coral Gables, Florida. 

He was appointed to CIM's faculty in 2012.
 

E-mail: dean.southern@cim.edu

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