Described as ‘a rising star’ and  ‘a dynamic performer…. with a sensitive, natural gesture and musical phrasing, a clear command of orchestral forces’ Dr. Maria Mercedes Diaz Garcia is a strong advocate of new music, having performed many premieres.

Mercedes Diaz Garcia' recent appearances include the Elbphilharmonie, Hamburg and Sendesaal, Bremen with her concerts being broadcast by the Deutschlandfunk Kultur in Germany. She has conducted orchestras in North America, South America and Europe, participating in festivals such as MIMO in Sao Paulo (Brazil) and The National Music Festival (USA).

Her passion for creative programming and contemporary music led her to found the VIVE! Ensemble. Since 2015 they have performed Kaija Saariaho’s Opera Emilie, the chamber versions of Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, plus many other compositions—standard literature and new works alike— including several premieres. VIVE! was invited in 2017 to perform in the annual New Music Gathering (celebrated in a different US city every year), were featured in the Toledo Museum of Art Great Performances series and were engaged for a tour that took them to Cincinnati, Nashville, and Dallas in the summer of 2018. 

Mercedes received Master degrees in conducting from Bard College, where she studied with Harold Farberman and from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, where she studied with Mark Gibson. She received a Doctoral degree in Contemporary Music at the Bowling Green State University where she studied with Emily Freeman Brown. Other influential conductors have been Kenneth Kiesler, Cliff Colnot,  Richard Rosenberg, Jessica Cottis, Edo de Waart and Paavo Jarvi, among others. 

In 2017 and 2018 she was invited to be artist-in-residence/conductor at the Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativity (Canada) to work with Steve Schick and the Ensemble Evolution. 

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Mercedes served as Conducting Fellow/Assistant Conductor of Orchestras during her doctorate at BGSU where she also conducted the New Music Ensemble. She wrote her doctoral dissertation on aspects of time in contemporary music. She received the Katzner Award as well as Pro Musica Scholarship Award, both in recognition of her outstanding academic and artistic work during her doctoral studies.

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She began her musical career as an oboist and pianist, receiving advanced degrees in both instruments, playing in orchestras in Spain, Germany and England, and recording as soloist for Spanish Television. She was awarded a tenured position from the Ministry of Education to teach oboe in National Conservatories in Spain and held professorships in Murcia and Madrid. In the United States she has taught conducting while a Teaching Assistant at the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music and at Bowling Green State University. 

Mercedes has performed many premieres, most recently the world premiere of Leo Brower’s Variaciones Concertantes (Brower is a distinguished composer from Latin America, commissioned by the Berlin Philharmonic), Effrain Oscher along with Rachel Walker, Hong Da Chin, Dimitri Papageourgiou and Christopher Dietz, among many others. With Praecepta—an organization of young American composers— she was conductor from 2015 until 2018 of their annual micro-opera performances featuring emerging composers. She is conductor and co-director of Hamburg Dialogues, a New Music Festival in its third season based in Hamburg, Germany.