Ryan Whittington received Bachelor of Arts degrees in Music and in German from Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where he graduated summa cum laude in 2014. As part of his degree requirements, he wrote his senior thesis on the compositional process of Arnold Schoenberg in his early twelve-tone works using information and experience gained at the Arnold Schoenberg Center in Vienna, Austria. He earned a Master of Music degree in historical musicology at Florida State University in 2016, where he wrote his master’s thesis on melodramatic vampire plays in 1820, based on history’s first vampire novel The Vampyre by John Polidori (1819). Part of that research was published in the collected volume Monster Media in Historical Contexts (2019) by Vernon Press as “Music to Save an Audience: Two Melodramatic Vampires of 1820 and the Music that Betrays Them.” Ryan also received the Doctor of Philosophy in Musicology at Florida State University in 2023 with his dissertation “What if the Monster Sings?: Caliban’s Humanity and Monstrosity Musically Negotiated in Adaptations of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.” Ryan studied organ with Dan Locklair while at Wake Forest University, and with Marilyn Keiser in 2019. He is the organist and choirmaster at Trinity Episcopal Church in Mount Airy, North Carolina, a post he has held since December 2021.