As a musician and creative producer, Zach Manzi has led creative teams at New World Symphony to innovate classical music performances for new audiences. Zach has produced dynamic performance experiences that blend interactivity, storytelling, and a relaxed atmosphere, including DIMENSIONS, transmuse, and Care, and has been invited to guest host live and broadcasted events such as the SONOS x IDAGIO #classicaltakeover event series and New World Symphony’s Face-Off Jr. With the support of Knight Foundation, Zach went on to co-create Audience Experience Design, an innovation framework for performing artists informed by his creative approach to performance design. He’s also spoken about the future of classical music in a TEDx talk called I’m Not Talking about Classical Music and at the Classical:NEXT conference in Rotterdam.
During the pandemic times, Zach moved on from a career in classical music to practice service design with some major brands in the software industry, including Airtable, GoDaddy, and Intuit, expanding on his human-centered work in the arts, and opening him to an entirely new industry and way of thinking about how to create incredible experiences for people.
Zach is a graduate of The Juilliard School and is based in Austin with his partner and two cats. He occasionally blogs on Medium.