Matthew Hinsley

About Matthew Hinsley

Dr. Matthew Hinsley received the 2020 Margaret Perry Award for Excellence in Education, was a 2019 recipient of the National Guild for Community Arts Education Milestone Award for more than twenty years of community service in the arts. He was named Public Citizen of the Year in 2017 by the Texas Statewide Division of the National Association of Social Workers, and was a winner of a 2015 Austin Under 40 award. Hinsley has worked as a community arts organizer in Central Texas since 1996. As Executive Director of Austin Classical Guitar (ACG), Dr. Hinsley has raised millions dollars in support of broad concert, community engagement, and educational programming, building the nation’s largest classical guitar nonprofit organization. In 2015 he joined the faculty at the University of Texas College of Fine Arts to teach courses in arts entrepreneurship and business management in the arts. In 2022 Hinsley opened Austin Classical Guitar\'s headquarters, the inspiring central Austin arts and learning venue known as The Rosette.Dr. Hinsley is founder and a lead author of the ACG curriculum and music library that, paired with extensive direct service, has transformed classroom guitar education in public schools across the United States reaching tens of thousands of students. The curriculum, which is now used internationally, is in service in over fifty Austin-area schools including for-credit programs at the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired, and multiple Juvenile Justice centers.Dr. Hinsley was trained as a classical guitarist and vocalist at the Interlochen Arts Academy, the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and the University of Texas at Austin. He has written seven books including Form & Essence, Classical Guitar for Young People, Creativity to Community: Arts Nonprofit Success One Coffee at a Time, and the film-optioned fantasy series Tinder & Flint.

Experience

1. Executive Director

   Austin Classical Guitar

   Oct 1996 — Present · Austin, TX, US

   Austin Classical Guitar (ACG) is the leading nonprofit organization dedicated to classical guitar in the United States. Founded in 1990, ACG currently presents close to 100 concerts annually through several diverse series, showcasing the world’s greatest guitarists along with local and regional talent, in performances reaching over audience members each year. ACG also promotes lifelong learning in the arts through enrichment classes, adult community ensembles, the highly-acclaimed ACG Youth Orchestra, and beginning guitar classes.At the heart of the organization’s mission is ACG Education, a program that was launched in 2001 in an effort to improve the quality of classroom-based guitar instruction in Austin schools. Twenty years later, ACG’s education team is supporting for-credit guitar programs they have built in nearly 60 elementary, middle, and high schools throughout the Austin area, bringing high-quality, long-term arts education to nearly students each week. The flexibility and comprehensiveness of ACG’s curriculum, which was published online in 2004 at GuitarCurriculum.com, has shown classical guitar to be a uniquely effective and engaging solution for under-resourced schools struggling to provide high-quality arts education for their students. Today, GuitarCurriculum.com and the teaching resources that accompany it are being used by hundreds of teachers throughout Texas and beyond, and ACG Education’s success in Austin schools is serving as a model for other communities around the world.In recent years, ACG’s services have expanded to include innovative education programs for Travis County youth who are incarcerated or on probation, as well as braille-adapted instruction for students at Texas School for the Blind & Visually Impaired. Through a partnership with Carnegie Hall, ACG offers the Lullaby Project, an arts intervention for new and expecting mothers facing economic, social and psychological challenges.

Education

• Oberlin College, Conservatory of Music

  Bachelor of Music

• The University of Texas at Austin

  Doctor of Musical Arts

• The University of Texas at Austin

  Master of Music