Indre Viskontas
Indre Viskontas (Lithuania) is a neuroscientist, opera singer and stage director and sought-after science communicator across all mediums. Combining a passion for music with scientific curiosity, she is affectionately known as Dr. Dre by her students at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where she pioneered the application of neuroscience to musical training, and at the University of San Francisco, where she is an Associate Professor of Psychology and director of the Creative Brain Lab. She received a BSc from the University of Toronto, a Master of Music in Voice Performance from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and a PhD in cognitive neuroscience from UCLA. Dr. Viskontas is the Chief Science Officer at Reverberation, a media company co-founded by musician Peter Gabriel whose mission is to enrich the lives of all people by leveraging the science of music.
As a scientist, Dr. Viskontas has published more than 50 original papers and chapters related to the neural basis of memory and creativity. She is currently the President of the Society for the Neuroscience of Creativity, Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board at the NeuroArts Blueprint, and Director of Communications for the Sound Health Network, an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts. Her scientific work has been featured in Oliver Sacks’ book Musicophilia, Nautilus, Nature: Science Careers and Discover Magazine. She has also written for American Scientist, MotherJones.com, Vitriol Magazine and other publications. Her white paper, Music for Every Child, outlining the impact of music education on child development, is a well-used resource for parents, teachers and policy-makers. Her first book, How Music Can Make You Better, was published by Chronicle Books in 2019, and within a week was the best-selling music appreciation book on Amazon.
She co-founded and was the Creative Director of Pasadena Opera, where she directed The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat, based on the famous case study written by Oliver Sacks and Proving Up, by one of opera’s most exciting composer/librettist duos, Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek. She also directed Katya Kabanova for West Edge Opera at the California Shakespeare Theater, and the premiere of a new work recounting the full story of Lady MacBeth at UCLA, among other operas. She recently collaborated with the New World Symphony and Edwin Outwater in Miami on By Ear: A Journey into Musical Perception which included live brain tracking.
In 2023, she was awarded the Osher Fellowship at the California Academy of Sciences to better understand the impact of conservation photography on our emotions and gave the second annual Chen Lecture on Brain Science in the planetarium Dome. She co-hosted the docuseries Miracle Detectives on the Oprah Winfrey Network and has appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show, major radio stations across the US, including several appearances on the NPR program City Arts & Lectures, the Ted Radio Hour and the Sunday Edition on the CBC in Canada. She also co-hosted the web series Science in Progress for Tested.com and VRV. She is also the host of the popular science podcast Inquiring Minds, which has been downloaded more than 14 million times. Her second podcast, Cadence: what music tells us about the mind was a finalist for the Science Media awards, and a Webby Honoree. In 2022, she wrote and hosted the Audible Original podcast Radiant Minds: the World of Oliver Sacks. She often gives keynote talks, for organizations as diverse as Genentech, LinkedIn, the Dallas Symphony, SXSW, TEDx and Ogilvy along with frequent invited talks at conferences and academic institutions. She has written and filmed 98 lectures across four courses for The Great Courses, Essential Scientific Concepts, Brain Myths Exploded: Lessons from Neuroscience, How Digital Technology Shapes Us and Your Creative Brain, streaming now on the Wondrium platform.
