Gustavo Dudamel is committed to creating a better world through music. His unwavering belief in the power of art to inspire and transform lives has fueled his unifying presence on and off the podium, his commitment to education and access for underserved communities around the world, and his mission to expand the impact of classical music to new and ever-larger audiences. His rise, from humble beginnings as a child in Venezuela to an unparalleled career of artistic and social achievements, offers living proof that culture can bring meaning to the life of an individual and greater harmony to the world at large. He currently serves as the Music & Artistic Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela, and in 2026, he becomes the Music & Artistic Director of the New York Philharmonic, continuing a legacy that includes Gustav Mahler, Arturo Toscanini, and Leonard Bernstein. Throughout 2025, Dudamel celebrates the 50th anniversary of El Sistema, honoring the global impact of José Antonio Abreu’s visionary education program across five generations, and acknowledging the vital importance of arts education.
2025/26 marks Dudamel's final season as the Music & Artistic Director of the LA Phil, celebrating 17 extraordinary years of groundbreaking programming, bold music-making, and an expansive vision that led The New York Times to herald the LA Phil as “the most important orchestra in America—period.” Continuing their industry-leading commitment to contemporary music, the Walt Disney Concert Hall season includes premieres of works by Ellen Reid (co-commissioned with the NY Phil), John Adams, Ricardo Lorenz, Angélica Negrón (whose cello concerto features Yo-Yo Ma as soloist), and Roberto Sierra, alongside towering performances of core repertoire that include Mahler's Symphony No. 2, “Resurrection,” Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, and Wagner's Die Walküre. The Great Wall of Los Angeles, a project curated by Dudamel and Gabriela Ortiz and inspired by Judy Baca’s beloved mural, brings together a group of acclaimed composers to create an hour-long symphonic tribute to Angelenos who have shaped this city’s history, featuring an original film by director Alejandro G. Iñárritu. In October 2025, Dudamel and the LA Phil also tour Korea, Japan, and Taiwan.
This year, Dudamel becomes Oscar L. Tang and H.M. Agnes Hsu-Tang Music & Artistic Director Designate of the New York Philharmonic, ahead of the much-anticipated official start to his tenure in the 2026/27 season. His ambitious programming vision with the orchestra is already on display in 2025/26, as he acknowledges the 250th anniversary of America's founding through a series of wide-ranging, nuanced, and urgently relevant programs, including John Corigliano’s First Symphony commemorating those lost in the AIDS epidemic, and the world premieres of three NY Phil commissions: Kānaka Maoli composer Leilehua Lanzilotti's of light and stone, David Lang's new oratorio the wealth of nations, and a staggering new vision for Frederic Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated with variations orchestrated by eighteen leading composers like Tania León, Andrew Norman, Arturo Márquez, Conrad Tao, Jerod Impichcha̱achaaha' Tate, Joel Thompson, and more.
2025 marks the 50th anniversary of El Sistema and the global impact of José Antonio Abreu's visionary education program across five generations. A tireless champion of El Sistema, Dudamel has worked directly with teachers and students on the ground in Venezuela, as well as visited El Sistema-inspired programs around the world. In October 2025, UNESCO designated El Sistema as a Category 2 Centre (C2C) for arts and cultural education focused on social inclusion, highlighting its excellence in international social action through music. Celebrations with the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra have included a European tour to Paris, London, Luxembourg, Berlin, Munich, Brussels, and Madrid; a residency in London that saw Dudamel and the orchestra opening for Coldplay at Wembley Stadium and performing at the Royal Festival Hall; and a series of recording releases on the Platoon label. In December of 2025, Dudamel travels to Valencia to perform Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7 with the National Children’s Symphony of Venezuela — with whom he gave an acclaimed 2024 performance at Carnegie Hall where The New York Times reported him exclaiming from the stage: “This is the Venezuela we want.”
Dudamel’s advocacy for the power of music to unite, heal, and inspire is global in scope. In appearances from the United Nations to the White House to the Nobel Peace Prize Concert to The New York Times' “Turning Points” essay series, Dudamel has served as a passionate advocate for music education and social integration through art. He has shared his own transformative experience in Venezuela’s El Sistema program as an example of how music can give a sense of purpose and meaning to a young person and help them rise above challenging circumstances. In 2007, Dudamel, the LA Phil, and its community partners founded YOLA (Youth Orchestra Los Angeles), which now provides more than 1,700 young people with free instruments, intensive music instruction, academic support, and leadership training, while also welcoming them to YOLA’s purpose-built, Frank Gehry-designed facility, the Judith and Thomas L. Beckmen YOLA Center at Inglewood. In 2012, Dudamel launched the Dudamel Foundation, which he co-chairs with his wife, actress and director María Valverde, with the goal of expanding access to music and the arts for young people by providing tools and opportunities to shape their creative futures. The Dudamel Foundation has hosted its Encuentros initiatives around the world, from Spain to the Hollywood Bowl, as a way to explore cultural unity and celebrate harmony, equality, dignity, beauty, and respect through music.
As a conductor, Dudamel is one of the few classical musicians to become a bona fide pop-culture phenomenon and has worked tirelessly to ensure that music reaches an ever-greater audience. In 2024, Dudamel was the first classical musician to be featured on the cover of Billboard. He was the first classical artist to participate in the Super Bowl halftime show, the youngest conductor ever to lead the Vienna Philharmonic’s New Year’s Concert, and in 2025 he and the LA Phil made history as the first professional symphony orchestra to perform at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. He has performed at global mainstream events from the Academy Awards to the reopening of Notre-Dame de Paris cathedral, and has worked with musical icons like Billie Eilish, Christina Aguilera, LL Cool J, Ca7riel y Paco, Cynthia Erivo, Laufey, Coldplay, and Nas.
Dudamel's film work continues to expand on both sides of the camera. He plays a prominent role in the acclaimed 2025 documentary El canto de las manos (The Song of the Hands), directed by María Valverde, which explores Deafness through music by following three Deaf musicians from Venezuela as they take on the challenge of performing Beethoven's Fidelio in sign language for the first time. He coproduced and composed the score to Alberto Arvelo’s 2025 film All We Cannot See, starring Valverde and Bruna Cusí, and also composed and recorded the score to Arvelo's feature film Libertador, about the life of Simón Bolívar. Dudamel conducted the score to Steven Spielberg’s new adaptation of West Side Story, and at John Williams’ personal request, he guest conducted the opening and closing credits of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. His film and television appearances include Sesame Street, The Simpsons, Mozart in the Jungle, Trolls World Tour, and The Nutcracker and the Four Realms. A documentary on his life titled ¡Viva Maestro! was released in 2022, and in 2019 Dudamel was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, joining Hollywood greats and musical luminaries such as Bernstein, Ellington, and Toscanini.
Dudamel’s extensive discography has reached hundreds of millions of listeners around the world, winning seven Grammy Awards and receiving nine nominations. He has released six albums on the innovative Platoon label, including Philip Glass’ Violin Concerto No.1 with Anne Akiko Meyers and the LA Phil, Odyssey and Boléro with the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra, and two recordings featuring the work of Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz with the LA Phil: 2024’s Revolución diamantina, which won the 2025 Grammy Awards for Best Orchestral Performance, Best Classical Compendium, and Best Contemporary Classical Composition; and 2025’s Yanga. He also played violin on his father Oscar Dudamel’s salsa music release, Sueño Alcanzado, on Platoon. Other recent releases include Decca's Khachaturian album with Jean-Yves Thibaudet and the LA Phil, Nonesuch’s recording of Thomas Adès’ Dante with the LA Phil, which won the 2024 Grammy Award for Best Orchestral Performance, and Fandango, with the LA Phil and violinist Anne Akiko Meyers, which received two Latin Grammy Awards (Best Classical Album and Best Contemporary Classical Composition) and two Grammy nominations. Dudamel's extensive and benchmark-setting discography with the legendary Deutsche Grammophon label includes the LA Phil recording of Mahler’s Symphony No. 8, which won a Grammy for Best Choral Performance, and the complete Charles Ives symphonies and Andrew Norman’s Sustain, which both won Grammy Awards for Best Orchestral Performance.
Dudamel is one of the most acclaimed conductors of his or any other generation. Among his many honors, he received the 2024 Queen Sofía Spanish Institute Award for Excellence and 2024 Academy of Achievement Golden Plate Award; he was named Glenn Gould Prize Laureate in 2022 and received Spain’s 2020 Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts; the Konex Foundation Classical Music Award, and the Distinguished Artist Award from the International Society for the Performing Arts (ISPA) in 2019; the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, the Páez Medal of Art, and the Pablo Neruda Order of Artistic and Cultural Merit in 2018; the Americas Society Cultural Achievement Award in 2016; the 2014 Leonard Bernstein Lifetime Achievement Award for the Elevation of Music in Society from the Longy School of Music; and the Medal of the University of Burgos, Spain, in 2021. Leading publications such as Musical America and Gramophone have named him their artist of the year. Dudamel has received honorary doctorates from The Juilliard School, Harvard University, the Universidad Centroccidental Lisandro Alvarado in his hometown, the University of Gothenburg, and the Colburn School. He was inducted into l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in Paris as a Chevalier in 2009 and became an Officier in 2022. The Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela was awarded Spain’s prestigious Prince of Asturias Award for the Arts in 2008. Dudamel was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in 2009. In 2016, he delivered the keynote speech for recipients of the National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal.
Gustavo Dudamel was born in 1981 in Barquisimeto, Venezuela. His father was a trombonist and his mother a voice teacher, and he grew up listening to music and conducting his toys to old recordings. He began violin lessons as a child but was drawn to conducting from an early age. At the age of 13, as a member of his youth orchestra, he put down his violin and picked up the baton when the conductor was running late. A natural, he began studying conducting with Rodolfo Saglimbeni. In 1996, he was named Music Director of the Amadeus Chamber Orchestra, where his talent was spotted by José Antonio Abreu, who would become his mentor. In 1999, at the age of 18, he was appointed Music Director of the Simón Bolívar Youth Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela, composed of graduates of the El Sistema program. Dudamel gained international attention when he won the inaugural Bamberger Symphoniker Gustav Mahler Competition in 2004. He went on to become Music Director of the Gothenburg Symphony (2007–12), of which he now holds the title of Honorary Conductor. Dudamel’s talent was widely recognized, notably by other prominent conductors of the day, but it was the Los Angeles Philharmonic that took the initiative in 2007 to sign the then 26-year-old Dudamel as Music Director, beginning in the 2009/10 season. Dudamel also held the position of Music Director of the Paris Opera from 2021 to 2023, leading acclaimed productions of Puccini’s Turandot and Tosca, Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, and John Adams’ Nixon in China, adding to an extensive operatic résumé that includes more than 30 staged, semi-staged, and concert productions around the world.