Anna Wittstruck is a conductor, cellist, and Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University. This spring she served as acting director and conductor for the Orchestral Studies Program at Stanford, where she directed the Stanford Symphony Orchestra, Stanford Philharmonia Orchestra, Stanford New Ensemble, and Stanford Chinese Ensemble. She has been the assistant conductor for Orchestral Studies since 2012 and conducted the Summer Stanford Symphony Orchestra for the past four years. She is also the assistant conductor and academic coordinator for the Stanford Youth Orchestra, an international program for advanced high school students, whose inaugural series took place last summer in the Bing Concert Hall. She has served as the music director of the Stanford Waltz Orchestra and conducted the San Jose Youth Symphony Concert Orchestra. She directed the first ever symphonic concert on Catalina Island: "Sounds of America," featuring Copland's Appalachian Spring. She also conducted concerts at the Rudolfinum in Prague and the Musikzentrum Augarten (home of the Vienna Boy's Choir) in Vienna, as well as concerts in Berlin, Bad Elster, and Teplice, as part of the 2013 Stanford Symphony Orchestra tour of Central Europe.

Ms. Wittstruck holds a B.A. in Music from Princeton University with certificates in orchestral conducting and creative writing. There she spent two years as assistant conductor of the Princeton University Orchestra and as associate conductor of the Princeton Sinfonia. She has attended the Pierre Monteux School of Conducting in Hancock, Maine, where she studied with Michael Jinbo. Other conducting teachers include Michael Pratt, Stephen Sano, and Jindong Cai.

Ms. Wittstruck is also an active orchestral musician whose performances as a cellist span from the Beijing Modern Music Festival to the 2011 YouTube Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Michael Tilson Thomas. She won a blind audition at the age of fourteen to become the youngest contracted member of the Asheville Symphony Orchestra, and has participated in orchestra festivals such as Tanglewood, Round Top, and the National Symphony/Kennedy Center Institute. She has appeared as a soloist with the Charlotte and Hendersonville Symphonies, on the Public Radio International show, “From the Top,” and most recently with the Stanford Symphony Orchestra. At Stanford, she is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology, a Ric Weiland Fellow in the Humanities and Sciences, and a recipient of the Hume Graduate Fellowship Fund in the Arts. Last spring she completed a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. She is currently writing her dissertation on neoclassicism in music-dance collaborations between the two world wars.