Faculty

image image

Dustin Howard

Composition, Music Production

Dustin is a self-taught musician and Emmy-award winning composer based in Tulsa, OK. As a teenager, he began playing in local rock bands, and in the years that followed he wrote music, played, and recorded with several touring bands including My Solstice and The Bourgeois. Currently, he’s the lead singer, songwriter, keyboardist/guitarist for the Tulsa-based band GROUCHO. He’s worked and recorded with some exceptionally talented musicians and producers, including Grammy award-winning sound engineer Trent Bell (formerly of the Chainsaw Kittens) and The Descendents guitarist Stephen Egerton.
 
As a composer, Dustin combines his skills as a versatile multi-instrumentalist with his passion for sound engineering, sound design, and production. He is influenced by everything from vintage video game scores and 70’s horror synth soundtracks to Prog Rock and ambient noise. He is equally as comfortable creating analog scores as he is composing digital scores.
 
Dustin’s work as a composer includes original film soundtracks, documentaries, music for Youtube channels, video games, podcasts. He has also written for and produced a number of alternative bands over the last 15 years. In 2020 he finished work on the score for the independent film Cigarettes for Breakfast. He has composed scores for several episodes of Osiyo: Voices of the Cherokee People and was a recipient of a Heartland Emmy Award in 2021 for his work on the series. In 2023 he finished two short film scores that will be released in 2024. 

As of Spring 2024, Dustin Howard is leading a community program through The bART Center for Music at Street School to assist and mentor students in the composition and production of original music for a musical loosely modeled after The Breakfast Club and 10 Things I Hate About You