Emilio Singleton (b. 2002) is a musician, linguist, and writer from Gainesville, Florida—currently based in Bloomington, Indiana. Emilio’s debut performance was at the age of 5 for a house concert audience including a massive yellow lab who wanted the attention more than Emilio did. Emilio’s sonic creative interests are in tactile engagement of timbre and embodiment of sound production, interdisciplinary collaboration, folk, and free improv. Their linguistic research interests are primarily in morphology, phonology, language documentation and preservation, and literacy resource-building. They are a Jacobs Scholar at Indiana University Bloomington pursuing undergraduate studies in music composition, viola, and linguistics, studying composition with Sky Macklay, Aaron Travers, Han Lash, Jeremy Podgursky, David Dzubay, and Don Freund, as well as viola with Atar Arad and Mark Holloway. In 2023 they received a Teaching Internship Grant from Hutton Honors College for their work in the Linguistics department.

Emilio’s work has been performed at Indiana University’s Grunwald Gallery, University of Georgia’s Hugh Hodgson Concert Hall, University of Florida, Princeton University’s Taplin Auditorium, Interlochen Center for the Arts, Petaluma Arts Center, Historic Thomas Center, St. Augustine Music Festival, and Shapeshifter Lab. Their work has been played by Matchstick Percussion, loadbang, Hub New Music, Mimi Stillman, Face the Music, Elisa Sutherland, Gainesville Civic Chorus, Alachua County Youth Orchestra, New York Youth Symphony, and World Youth Wind Symphony. As part of Sō Percussion Summer Institute 2022, Matchstick Percussion premiered FRICTION, a musical role-playing game, which was presented at Penn State New Music Festival and Symposium 2023 and the 2025 Atlas Intersections Festival in Washington, D.C. In 2024, Emilio was a Stone Fellow for the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, with a commissioned premiere of glint, gleam, glow at the Detroit Institute of Arts by the Hesper Quartet.

Emilio has recorded and premiered live-to-picture Daniel Whitworth’s score for the 2022 Jon Vickers Film Scoring Award at the IU Cinema, as part of the Library of Congress’ restoration of Phil for Short in Kino Lorber’s “Cinema’s First Nasty Women” collection. With the Indiana University Symphony Orchestra, they performed William Grant Still’s opera Highway 1 USA and premiered Don Freund’s Urban Pastorale. They have also been part of Indiana University’s Conductors Orchestra. In spring 2023 they performed in the premiere of Shulamit Ran’s opera Anne Frank with the IU Philharmonic Orchestra. They made an acting debut in IU’s 2022 production of L’Étoile. In Spring 2024, their orchestration of David Davila’s new work Vox Pop! A Post-Democratic Musical ran for seven IU Theatre shows in the Ruth N. Halls Theatre and received the 2025 KCACTF Musical Theatre and Latinx Awards. They have viola credits for Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812, Vox Pop! and Songs for a New World (IU Theatre 2024), and is playing violin for Wizard of Oz this winter with Constellation Stage & Screen, and Legally Blonde The Musical with IU Theatre in 2025.

In 2020, Emilio was a founding member and Director of Communications for the National Arts Diversity Integration Association (NADIA), a nonprofit organization which held space for discussing DEI issues across the performing arts and envisioning models of sustainable creative ecosystems. NADIA hosted the Amplified Currents Festival in 2020 at Massawa NYC and in 2021 at High Line Nine. At Indiana University, Emilio is involved in the Chin Languages Research Project led by Dr. Kelly Berkson, primarily working with Lutuv speaker Siy Hne Paa. Within both the Linguistics and the French and Italian Departments, Emilio has served as an undergraduate teaching assistant. Emilio is also a research collaborator on Haitian Creole projects with Dr. David Tezil at the University of Alabama.