Over the past 30 years Dan Allcott has maintained a busy and varied conducting schedule as an educator and professional. He has served as Music Director of the Atlanta Ballet Orchestra, Oak Ridge Symphony Orchestra, Tennessee Philharmonic, and Bryan Symphony. Additionally he has led the Columbus (IN) Youth Orchestra, Terre Haute Youth Orchestra, and Artistic Director of Eastport Strings. He has been a guest conductor with the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, Dallas Symphony Orchestra, Oregon Coast Youth Orchestra Festival, and Omaha Area Youth Orchestras. Dan has been Director of Orchestra Studies at Tennessee Tech University since 2003, where he founded the Tennessee Tech String Project (with a grant from the National String Project Consortium).
He has collaborated with musicians and composers from across the state, in addition to bringing world class musicians to Tennessee audiences. Dan has conducted world premiers by Tennessee composers Stefan Freund, Rachel DeVore Fogarty, Mark Harrell, and Greg Danner, and was an original commissioner of the League of American Orchestra's initial "Made in America" project, giving the Tennessee premier of a work by Joan Tower. In the Spring of 2019 he conducted the world premier or Lucas Richman’s “Symphony: This Will Be Our Reply” with the Oak Ridge Symphony and Chorus, and repeated the work in the composer's presence in the spring of 2022 with the Bryan Symphony Orchestra.
In 2010 Dan concluded a 10-year association with the Atlanta Ballet, where he conducted more than 300 performances as Music Director and Principal Conductor and led daring collaborations with diverse groups such as New Birth Missionary Baptist Church Choir, Indigo Girls, Michael O'Neal Singers, and many other non-traditional ballet partners. Susan Elliott, writing for the Atlanta Journal Constitution, remarked, "Dan Allcott deserves major credit for metamorphosing the Atlanta Ballet Orchestra."
Among the other orchestras he has conducted are the Danish Radio Orchestra, Eastern Sierra Chamber Orchestra, Asheville Lyric Opera and Orchestra Iowa. An accomplished cellist, he continues to perform nationally, concertizing with the Cumberland Piano Trio, Isotone New Music Group, and teaches and performs each year at the Tennessee Cello Workshop in Knoxville and the Tapestry Cello Workshop in Asheville, NC.
Dan holds a masters degree in cello performance from Indiana University where he completed his coursework towards the Doctor of Music in both conducting and cello performance before moving to Atlanta to become Music Director of Atlanta Ballet. At Indiana he served as Associate Instructor of Conducting and conductor of the Indiana University New Music Ensemble. Concurrently, Allcott was appointed the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra's Conducting Fellow, a position he held for three years. In 1998, Mr. Allcott was named the first Herbert von Karajan Fellow of the American Austrian Foundation at the Salzburg Festival and was subsequently accepted to conduct in the Nicolai Malko and Grzegorz Fitelberg competitions in Europe.