“…has been impacting communities from Houston to New York with his artistry, teaching and passion for community improvement for more than 30 years.”
Paul Boyd Day, Annise Parker Mayor of Houston
February 26, 2015
Dr. Paul Boyd
PAUL BOYD is Chair of the Fine Arts Department and Director of Piano Studies at College of the Mainland in the Houston area. Dr. Boyd leads the Foundation for Modern Music (FMM) as Artistic and Executive Director. Annual audiences have grown during his tenure from under 200 to over 10,000. An avid supporter of new music, he has to date premiered over 40 works by Ofer Ben-Amots, Mark Buller, Mohammed Fairouz, Arthur Gottschalk, John Kiefer, Walter Steffens, Christopher Theofanidis, Mary Carol Warwick, and others – in addition to his own compositions. Besides FMM concerts, he has been heard regularly with the Greenbriar Consortium, Latin music and dance organization Flamárt, and in broadcasts on stations KUHA/KUHF (PBS), KPFT (Pacifica), and KTMD (Telemundo). As a grant writer, his portfolio has long surpassed $1.000,000.
Piano studies were with Anne Dean Turk, Carol Houston, Ruth Tomfohrde, and Abbey Simon; composition with David Ashley White. Dr. Boyd taught on the piano faculty of the American Festival for the Arts Conservatory from 2012-20. Recent performance highlights include the premiere of Warwick’s song cycle The Gathering at New York’s LaMama Theatre Center with baritone Anthony Turner, the gallery installation of his work Water Sketches written for an exhibit of Mona Marshall’s art in San Antonio, a recording of the Steffens chamber opera Two Cells in Sevilla, and a sold-out engagement of The Gathering at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in August 2019.
In a review of a Fairouz concerto premiere and FMM concert, critic Joel Luks of Culture Map claimed: “Boyd's muscly reading punished whomever or whatever stood in his way… The Foundation for Modern Music's event was an involved intervention on the city's classical music scene.” Paul was named a Cultural Ambassador by the City of Houston in 2013 and received mayoral proclamations in 2015 and 2019.
