Brazilian-born conductor Danielle Lisboa is assistant conductor for Orchestra Toronto, one of Canada’s premier community volunteer symphony orchestras. Lisboa, who has a doctorate in orchestral conducting from the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester, New York, is working under the orchestra’s music director, Errol Gay, conducting rehearsals and performances and presenting pre-concert lectures.

Most recently, Lisboa was co-conductor of the Brockport Symphony Orchestra, a volunteer orchestra in New York State. Lisboa has held appointments with some of the major orchestras in Brazil, including Orquestra do Teatro Nacional in Brasilia, while working as professor of music at Candido Mendes University in Rio de Janeiro. She championed the need to reach out to the community and to inspire and inform music lovers by delivering lectures and seminars in music appreciation.

Lisboa is a recipient of the Brazilian Government's prestigious CAPES/Fulbright scholarship, which sponsored her doctoral studies under maestro Neil Varon. Other significant awards include the Schissler Conducting Prize and honors from the International Conducting Competition Fundação Oriente held in Portugal.

Lisboa received her master’s degree in orchestral conducting, with special emphasis on opera conducting, from the University of Houston. She was appointed assistant conductor to Peter Jacoby at the Moores Opera House, where she was praised for conducting operatic performances, including productions of Il matrimonio segreto and The Medium. She also helped coach and conduct performances of Dialogues of the Carmélites, La vida breve, Gianni Schicchi and The Ghost of Versailles.  

She studied orchestral conducting with Franz Anton Krager, choral conducting with Charles Hausmann and opera conducting with Peter Jacoby and Larry Rachleff at Rice University in Houston, Texas.  She made her American debut conducting the Moores School of Music Symphony Orchestra at Cullen Performance Hall in Houston.

Lisboa began her professional career as a concert pianist. She studied and later taught piano at the Conservatório Brasileiro de Música in Brazil and in the United States at the Kingwood Music School in Kingswood, Texas.

Her academic studies began at Brazil’s largest university, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, where she founded a chamber orchestra dedicated to promoting the music of emerging Brazilian composers. At the time, Lisboa was conductor of the CCMN University Choir-UFRJ. She won the conducting competition at the XIII Curitiba Music Festival in Brazil, receiving rave reviews, and made her opera debut conducting a Brazilian production of Ernest Mahle’s opera Maroquinhas Fru-Fru.