MAURITA PHILLIPS-THORNBURGH ("Bunny"), founder and artistic director, has an extraordinary record of repertoire and performance. She enjoys an international reputation with an active career in both concert and recording venues, having performed as soloist with conductors Zubin Mehta, George Solti, Eric Leinsdorf, William Steinberg, Herbert Blomstedt, Leonard Stein, and Gerard Schwarz and Esa-Pekka Salonen in repertoire ranging from the early music to the masterworks from the Baroque through twenty-first century. Trained at La Sierra University and California Institute of the Arts, she was awarded a Doctor of Fine Arts honoris causa from Andrews University in Summer 2000.

She graces the concert stage not only as performer but also as conductor. She has led CANTORI DOMINO as founder and artistic director, through a wide range of works, numerous concerts, tours of Spain, Portugal and Eastern Europe, choral workshops and multicultural events. Under Ms. Phillips-Thornburgh, CANTORI DOMINO performed a week-long residency at York Minster in England in late summer 2004. She has conducted a variety of choral ensembles since age sixteen, including choirs at First Congregational Church and Bel Air Presbyterian Church in Los Angeles, and currently at St. Augustine by-the-Sea Episcopal Church in Santa Monica.

Off the concert stage, she can be heard in recordings for Capitol, Angel, Chapel, ABC and Orion labels, including a premiere recording of Gerhard Samuel's Sunlike. She is also very active in sound-track recordings for television and film, including Close Encounters, Empire of the Sun, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Beauty and the Beast, Hook, Aladdin, Home Alone II, Jurassic Park, Boys on the Side, Father of the Bride II, Glimmer Man, Extreme Measures, Legend of Mulan, Anatasia, Amistad, Wild, Wild West, Snow Falling on Cedars, The Astronaut’s Wife, Space Cowboys, Family Man, Behind Enemy Lines, Matrix Reloaded, Matrix Revolution and Van Helsing. She can also be heard on a the latest Barbra Streisand album. Although at home in literature from the fourteenth century through "just off the press" twenty-first century works, it is the music of the baroque, and particularly that of J.S. Bach, in which she is most deeply invested.