Owen Rees is a choral conductor, organist, and musicologist, and his various activities, by his own testimony, reinforce one another. He is a professor at Oxford University and organist and choir director at Queen's College there. Rees was born in 1964. He attended St. Catharine's College, Cambridge University, studying music and supporting himself as an organ scholar, a musician whose expenses are defrayed in return for his contributions to the college's musical life. He stayed on for a doctorate at Cambridge, studying musicology with Renaissance specialists Peter le Huray and Iain Fenlon. By the time he finished his dissertation in 1991, he had already begun teaching at St. Peter’s College and St. Edmund Hall at Oxford as a lecturer. He moved to the University of Surrey as a reader (a rank between lecturer and professor) in 1996. He moved to Oxford in 1997, assuming the posts of Lecturer in the Faculty of Music; Fellow, Tutor, and Organist of Queen’s College; and Senior Research Fellow of Somerville College; he was promoted to Reader in 2006 and continues to hold these posts. As Queen's College organist, Rees conducts the Choir of The Queen's College, Oxford, and he has also conducted the Cambridge Taverner Choir, Contrapunctus, and A Cappella Portuguesa. He has stated that his research activities often inform the repertory he programs as a choir director and that the influence also runs in the opposite direction. As a scholar, Rees has edited works by composers Manuel Cardoso, Pedro de Cristo, and Duarte Lobo, and he has also programmed the music of these little-known figures in concert. Rees has led choirs in concert at the Oslo Kirchenmusic Festival, Festival International Portico de Semana Santa de Zamora, and the York Early Music Festival. He conducts the Choir of Queen's College in chapel services three times a week during school terms, as well as at various other events. Rees has a catalog of more than 20 albums as director of various groups on Hyperion, Herald Records, Guild, and other labels. Since 2013, he has led the Choir of The Queen's College, Oxford, and Contrapunctus in a series of recordings of mostly English choral music. In 2020, Rees issued a pair of new releases, one featuring Contrapunctus and the Choir of The Queen's College in Taverner's multi-textural Missa Gloria tibi trinitatis, and another with Contrapunctus, Salve, Salve, Salve: Josquin's Spanish Legacy.