Dorian Wallace

Dorian Wallace is a composer, pianist, and board-certified music therapist who explores music's healing qualities in therapeutic work, social action, and community engagement. His practice brings together contemporary classical composition, free improvisation, and a commitment to emotionally resonant experiences. His compositions often engage with sociopolitical, emotional, and psychological themes, drawing on experimentalism, expressionism, romanticism, and rhythmic complexity. He has collaborated with artists including Paul Pinto, Pamela Z, Bonita Oliver, and John Sanborn.

With violinist Hajnal Pivnick, he co-founded the NYC-based new music collective Tenth Intervention, which has performed live silent-film scores at venues such as Nitehawk Cinema, Threes Brewing, and the late Videology. He also accompanies the Sing In Solidarity chorus, amplifying the voices of activists, marginalized communities, and international labor and decolonial movements.

His music therapy work has reached people incarcerated at Rikers Island, Crossroads Juvenile Detention Center, and Sing Sing Correctional Facility; survivors of cults through the Lalich Center for Cults and Coercion; and hospice patients at Calvary Hospital. Using dynamic listening, improvisation, and lyric analysis, he supports trauma-informed, liberation-centered therapeutic spaces. His Liberation Music Therapy concept has been presented at Columbia University, the Trauma Research Foundation, Montclair State University, the University of Louisville, and Loughborough University, among others. He leads workshops for adult film workers through Pineapple Support, activists experiencing burnout through the Democratic Socialists of America, and people transitioning out of insular communities with Footsteps.

Dorian is also a mindfulness-based cognitive therapy coach. On Insight Timer he teaches emotional grounding and self-awareness, combining traditional Buddhist Vipassana techniques with contemporary trauma-informed approaches. As a dance and ceremony accompanist, he creates responsive soundscapes for movement, storytelling, and ritual, and he teaches a course at the Martha Graham School that deepens professional dancers' relationship with musicality.