Michael Markowski (b. 1986) is fully qualified to watch movies and cartoons. In 2010, he graduated magna cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Film Practices from Arizona State University. While Markowski never studied music in college, his primary music teachers have included Gary Larkins, Dawn Parker, Jon Gomez, Dr. Karl Schindler and Michael Shapiro. He has continued this education by participating in a number of extracurricular programs, such as The Art of Orchestration with Steven Scott Smalley (2008), the National Band Association’s Young Composer and Conductor Mentorship Project (2008) and the NYU/ASCAP Foundation’s Film Scoring Workshop (2014) where he was named one of ASCAP’s Film & TV Composers to Watch. Mark Snow, composer of The X-Files and one of the workshop’s guest mentors, says Michael’s music was “extremely sophisticated” and “complimented the mood and emotion of the scene with unusual maturity and sensitivity.” Most recently, Markowski was invited to join the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop (2015) as a composer and lyricist.

Shadow Rituals, one of Markowski’s first works for concert band, was awarded first prize in Manhattan Beach Music’s Frank Ticheli Composition Contest in 2006. Over the last ten years, Markowski has composed nearly twenty-five original works for wind band, nine of which were recently recorded in collaboration with the Brooklyn Wind Symphony, now available on iTunes. Joyride for Orchestra (2015) recently won the Arizona Musicfest’s young composer fanfare competition, and You Are Cordially Invited (2016) recently won a fanfare competition with the Dallas Wind Symphony. He has received commissions from a number of organizations including CBDNA, the Consortium for the Advancement of Wind Band Literature, the Lesbian and Gay Band Association, the Durham Medical Orchestra, the Florida Music Educator’s Association and has received performances from the United States Air Force bands, The Phoenix Symphony, the Arizona Musicfest Symphony Orchestra and from hundreds of bands around the world. He has been the composer-in-residence for the Music for All organization (2015), the Mid Europe international wind band festival in Schladming, Austria (2013 to 2018), and frequently visits junior high schools, high schools, universities and community bands around the country to share stories about his music.

He is a member of ASCAP and currently lives in Brooklyn, New York.