Deanna Witkowski
Pianist, composer, and scholar Deanna Witkowski moves with remarkable ease between Brazilian, jazz, classical, and sacred music. Her first book, Mary Lou Williams: Music For The Soul (Liturgical Press), is the winner of the 2022 ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award and the 2022 Jazz Journalists Association Award for Biography of the Year. Her seventh recording as a bandleader, Force of Nature (MCG Jazz), reached number five on the JazzWeek nationwide radio chart and remained in the top ten most played albums on jazz radio for more than ten weeks. The two projects cap a twenty-year deep dive into the ground-breaking impact of Williams’ life and music, making Witkowski one of the few living authorities on the iconic pianist. As a sought after Williams expert, she has taught for Jazz at Lincoln Center, presented at the Kennedy Center, Loyola University Chicago, and Fordham University, and performed Williams’ compositions as a featured guest with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. In 2024, Witkowski completed her PhD in jazz studies at the University of Pittsburgh and is currently writing her second book based on her doctoral dissertation, “Jazz in the Pews: ‘Experiments in Sunday Worship’ in the 1960s.”
Witkowski is the winner of the 2002 Great American Jazz Piano Competition. She has recorded with Grammy nominees John Patitucci, Kate McGarry, and Donny McCaslin, and has performed and toured with vocalists Lizz Wright, Nnenna Freelon, Erin Bode, FilHer albums range from powerhouse arrangements of Cole Porter standards (; Length of Days) to sparkling trio re-imaginings of traditional hymns (Makes the Heart to Sing: Jazz Hymns) to solo piano that blurs the lines between Brazilian, jazz, and classical (Raindrop: Improvisations with Chopin). Dedicated to bringing communities together through jazz, Witkowski has worked as a guest music leader in over one hundred churches across the United States. Her weekly video series, “Off the Page: Sacred Jazz,” shares practical resources for church musicians and her jazz hymn arrangements have been purchased by over 500 churches.
A prolific choral composer, Witkowski has won multiple competitions for her concert and sacred works. Her modern justice anthem, “We Walk in Love,” is part of the Justice Choir songbook and has been sung at the sixtieth anniversary of the Little Rock Nine at Central High School in Arkansas in 2017, at the 2018 St. Olaf Choral Festival, and as the closing song at the 2020 Chorus America conference. Commissions and new compositions have been funded by organizations including the New York State Council on the Arts (for her Afro-Brazilian project, the ) and the Choral Arts Initiative PREMIERE|Project Festival.
Returning to Chicago, where she lived in the 1990s, Witkowski is the new professor of jazz piano at Elmhurst University. Experience her work at deannajazz.com.