Faculty

Emily Sung is an assistant professor of choral music and director of the USC Thornton Oriana Choir. At USC, Emily teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in conducting, choral literature, choral development, and liturgical music. She leads the USC Thornton Oriana Choir in 8 performances per year, including curricular concerts and community performances in the greater Los Angeles area. Oriana Choir is a treble voice ensemble that performs classical and contemporary music, including pop, folk, and vocal jazz. In 2026, Oriana Choir premiered a choral version of “Fix You Up” by The Wild Reeds and collaborated on a choral version of “Bone to Bone” by folk duo Small Fools. 

Before her appointment at USC, Emily previously served as the Associate Director of Choral Activities at Princeton University, the Director of the Chamber Choir and Choral Society at the University of Pennsylvania, and a member of the conducting faculty at Temple University. From 2016-2019, Emily was the Assistant Chorus Master at Opera Philadelphia, where she helped prepare choruses for the company’s groundbreaking Festival O and numerous mainstage productions. Emily also previously served as the Assistant to the Music Director of the Pennsylvania Ballet, the Director of the Singing City Children’s Choir, the Music Director of Opera Philadelphia’s Teen Voices of the City Ensemble (T-VOCE), and a singer and co-conductor of the Chestnut Street Singers.

As an educator, Emily works with conductors to expand their gestural vocabulary, to create richness of sound, and to observe and clinic their own conducting with precision. Her graduate choral literature courses offer students a comprehensive grounding in Western choral literature from the early modern period to the present, focusing on the evolution of choral forms and genres across time and place. Her choral development class guides students through the artistic and administrative particularities of working with professional, volunteer, educational, and youth choirs, using the choirs of Los Angeles as a learning laboratory. Emily has mentored students conducting doctoral research in diverse areas including Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese, Yiddish, and German Baroque choral music, gender expansive voice pedagogy, and K-pop.

Emily is the co-founder and former co-artistic director of Suara SE Asian Choir, a Los Angeles-based community choir dedicated to Southeast Asian communal singing. She was awarded the 2026 Creativity Grant by the California Choral Directors Association and is currently conducting research on the Southern California choral education pipeline.