Paul Hodgins

About

Paul Hodgins is an arts and culture journalist who co-founded the Arts & Culture section of Voice of OC and helped manage its transition to Culture OC. Hodgins was born in Canada, where he studied piano through the Royal Conservatory of Music (Toronto) and became a professional accompanist by the age of 19. Hodgins worked widely in Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. as an accompanist at Simon Fraser University, the Banff Centre for the Arts, Eastern Michigan University, Nonington College (Kent), and many festivals, collaborating with leading European and North American dancers and choreographers. He moved to the U.S. to pursue graduate studies in the 1980s and has lived here ever since. While completing his doctorate in musical composition and theory at the University of Southern California, Hodgins was a professor of dance at the University of California, Irvine from 1985 to 1992, where he was music director of the dance department and founding director of the Gassmann Electronic Music Studio. After serving as classical music critic at the San Diego Union-Tribune, he became an arts journalist and critic for The Orange County Register, where he wrote principally about theater, dance and classical music for 25 years. In addition to his expertise in the performing arts, Hodgins has written extensively about wine, jazz, architecture, interior design and urban planning. His work has appeared in American Theatre, Backstage West, Electronic Musician, The Journal of Alta California, Journal of the International Guild of Musicians in Dance, The Sondheim Review, Variety and other publications. His honors include a 2019 National Arts Journalism Award. Hodgins also spent five years in marketing, principally as managing editor of custom content for The Orange County Register. Hodgins’ book, Music, Movement and Metaphor (Edwin Mellen, 1992), established him as one of the foundational scholars of choreomusicology, and it has been cited more than 150 times since its publication. Hodgins has also written three books about California wine. Hodgins remains active as an educator. Since leaving UC Irvine, he has held academic positions at the USC Thornton School of Music, where he devised a music curriculum for the new Musical Theatre program, and California State University, Fullerton, where he was on the faculty of the journalism and dance programs.