Danielle Ong is currently a Graduate Teaching Assistant pursuing her Doctor of Musical Arts (D.M.A) degree at the University of North Carolina Greensboro (UNCG) under the tutelage of Professor Robert Young. She was awarded the UNCG Alumni/Excellence/Hayes Fellowship Award 2024, was a grant recipient for several professional projects, and acquired competition accolades, including 1st Prize in the 2023 Southard Music Competition. Her teaching experience encompasses individual lessons, quartet coaching, large ensemble coaching, and studio classes at the collegiate level in Asia and the US. More recently, she served as a faculty member, clinician, competition adjudicator and performing artist at the Asia Pacific Saxophone Academy (APSA) Summer Camp 2023, and the Singapore International Saxophone Summit Conference and Competition (SISSCC) 2025 and 2026. Both events hosted participants from across the globe, and featured performances of repertoire spanning across genres of classical, jazz and contemporary music. 

She has commissioned solo and quartet works at various conferences and concerts internationally. With the New Meta Quartet, she commissioned local Singaporean works at the 2018 World Saxophone Congress in Zagreb, Croatia, and 2025 in Harbin, China. Her orchestral experience also extends to string, wind, and jazz orchestras. Some notable performances include performing in the UNC Compass Jazz Orchestra with Count Basie Orchestra vocalist Carmen Bradford, recording an album of big band music for jazz composer Paul McKee, and in the Fort Collins Symphony with Stewart Copland’s Police: Deranged. She recently gave a guest artist recital at the University of Florida, and has also performed as a soloist in concert halls such as the Victoria Concert Hall and the Esplanade in Singapore. She will also giving several solo and collaborative recitals in Oxford, UK over the summer of 2026. 

More recently, Danielle has begun exploring interdisciplinary performance art as another avenue of creativity, through free improvisation, chance music and other experimental performance methods. These robust experiences have influenced her playing, approach and overall pedagogy through her varied interests and specialities that deviate from the standard Western canon. 

She also values her experience in music administration and academia. As a joint organizer of the APSA Summer Camp since 2017, her duties include organizing the camp’s events and logistics for lessons, competitions, concerts, and masterclasses for over 120 international students and faculty. She also currently serves as an academic advisor at the Singapore Raffles College of Music (SRMC), where the vocational curriculum of this program encourages original and relevant research to current industry practices. Her duties as an advisor include research, thesis and project reviewing, advising and grading for undergraduate and graduate students.

Her research interests include the psychology and philosophy of music education, the role and functionality of multiculturalism in music as well as the state and future of jazz in the Southeast Asian region. She is also particularly interested in increasing cultural competence and understanding of these topics on the international stage. At the Jazz Education Network (JEN) Conference 2025 in Georgia, Atlanta, she presented her research on the overview of jazz in Singapore and future implications for jazz education in the region. More recently, she presented her pedagogy research paper on supporting young music educators via improving lesson effectiveness at the 2025 Symposium on Music Teacher Education at Butler University, Indiana.