Chloe Clarke Smith is a Baltimore-based composer, pianist, and educator whose music explores narrative as a guide for creating music that processes the vulnerability of human emotions and experiences. She has had the pleasure of collaborating with various new music ensembles including: andPlay, Yarn/Wire, Splinter Reeds, Departure Duo, Sound Icon, and counter)induction. In addition, she has received commissions from the ensembles Quartet Iris, Relâche Ensemble, and The Ringers as well from the organization Castle of Our Skins. She has also received fellowships from Organizations such as SPHINXConnect, Castle of Our Skins, and the Alba Music Composition Program based in Italy.

This season she is looking forward to the remastered premier of her film She Is Music, first premiered at the Raindance Film Festival in London, UK. Her endeavors for the future include immersing herself in the study of ethnomusicology from an artistic standpoint, diversifying the curriculum of classical music, and further experimenting with the boundaries of harmony, space, and color in her own music. 

While she pursues her Master in Composition at the Peabody Conservatory, she prepares for her research with a focus upon Classical composers of the African Diaspora. Her study will focus on researching composers, activists, and influential music leaders in churches during the Jim Crow era in Baltimore specifically. The end goal of the research, in tandem with building a concert program that performs works of those composers to raise awareness black composers’ influence on the history of classical music, is to create a response piece to her findings and program living composers' music alongside theirs. 

Her ongoing project She Is Music explores the stories of two women at the Berklee College of Music: one a professor, the other a student. Exploring their worlds, it tells the experience of what it’s like to be black women in music, especially in music academia, and how those worlds have changed and adapted over time. Underneath will be melodies and rhythms by black women musicians and composers of a variety of genres to show the variety within the culture.

Receiving her Bachelors in Composition at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee with a Minor in Africana Studies, Chloe is now pursuing her MM and DMA in Composition at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins as a Pathways to DMA Fellow.