MA Top 30 Professional: Hannah Ross

Director of Learning
Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra

Hannah Ross is new to the Cincinnati Symphony, having just been hired in the fall. But she arrives with a wealth of experience: A member of Sphinx’s sixth LEAD cohort, she has nine years under her belt at the Rhode Island Philharmonic, where she built up its education and community engagement arm.

Ross first came to Rhode Island via a fellowship at Community MusicWorks, a nonprofit in Providence that also once counted Jessie Montgomery among its fellows. After that, she became a viola teacher at the Rhode Island Philharmonic and Music School, the organization she would call home for nearly a decade. Ross climbed through the ranks, eventually becoming assistant director of community engagement.

Ultimately, she ended up overseeing Victoria’s Dream Project—the Philharmonic’s same free, after-school strings program for which she’d been a freelancer teacher. Also under her aegis was a fellowship co-administered by the Philharmonic and Boston University, granted to student musicians from historically underrepresented backgrounds. At its peak, she grew her department to four teaching artists and a community-engagement manager.

Cincinnati isn’t totally new to Ross: She’s visited over the years to catch up with CSO violist Caterina Longhi, who was her roommate at Juilliard. But she arrives at the CSO at a crucial juncture. Students v. Harvard and the Trump blitz on DEI educational programs forced the orchestra to sever its fellowship program, co-administered with the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music. To move forward, CSO has created a position within Ross’s department that will work on the program fulltime, which will resume with two new fellows in fall 2026.

“I was, at one point, looking into a lot of fellowship programs myself,” Ross says. “I’m excited at the opportunity to create careerpath plans with the new fellows.”