CONDUCTORS

Juan Felipe Molano – Music Director & Conductor
Juan Felipe Molano (he/him/el) brings twenty years of vibrant teaching and performing experience to the position of SYSO Music Director. His career includes conducting positions with top professional and youth orchestras throughout Europe, the United States, Asia, South America, and Central America. Since 2014, he has served as Conductor of Youth Orchestra Los Angeles (YOLA), a program of the Los Angeles Philharmonic that puts the transformative power of music-making into the hands of young people who would not otherwise have access to it. Maestro Molano joined SYSO in 2019, and in that time has overseen meaningful programmatic changes, including increased access between SYSO’s educational programs, greater inclusion in the concert hall, both artistically and socially, and, most notably, led SYSO through the height of the COVID-19 pandemic with creative and diligent programming.

Ryan Dudenbostel – Conductor
Ryan Dudenbostel is the Director of Orchestral Studies at Western Washington University, where he conducts the WWU Symphony Orchestra and leads the contemporary music ensemble NowHearThis! Prior to joining the faculty at Western, he served as the Music Director of the El-Sistema-based Santa Monica Youth Orchestra. He has been a regular guest conductor on the Jacaranda new music series in Los Angeles, and acted as Interim Artistic Director for the Marrowstone Music Festival in the summer of 2019. He also served for three seasons as a rehearsal and cover conductor at the Manhattan School of Music in New York City, preparing the student orchestras for such eminent conductors as Philippe Entremont, Yoav Talmi, Kent Tritle, H. Robert Reynolds, and Kenneth Kiesler.
Dudenbostel was among fewer than a dozen Americans invited to participate in the 11th Cadaqués Orchestra International Conducting Competition in Barcelona. His new performing edition of Henry Purcell’s opera The Indian Queen, created in collaboration with director Peter Sellars, was performed by the English National Opera in 2015, following its premiere at the Teatro Real in Madrid in 2013.
Ryan Dudenbostel has collaborated with vocalist John Duykers, violinist Mark O’Connor, violist David Aaron Carpenter, pianists Gloria Cheng and Mikhail Voskresensky, director Peter Sellars, and the legendary actor James Earl Jones, among many others. He has also appeared on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. He is a graduate of UCLA, the University of Missouri—Kansas City Conservatory, and Western Washington University, and has studied conducting with Neal Stulberg, Robert Olson, David Wallace, Kenneth Kiesler, Gustav Meier and Rossen Milanov.