Executive Director

Aline Sam-Giao is Executive Director of the Liege Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. After studying at the Institut d'études politiques de Paris and the University of Sussex in the UK, she chose to pursue a career in music, inspired by her practice of the oboe. 

Her professional career led her to the Royaumont Foundation and the baroque ensemble Le Poème Harmonique in the Paris region, then to Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, where she worked for the Festival Berlioz and served for eight years as General Manager of the Orchestre des Pays de Savoie. In 2017, she moved to Lyon to become Executive Director of L’AO (Auditorium–Orchestre national de Lyon), a 2,100-seat concert hall and home to a 104-member symphony orchestra, which joined the European Concert Hall Organisation (ECHO) network in 2021. 

Drawn to international challenges, she later left France to take up the position of Executive Director of the Liege Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and its Philharmonic Hall in 2023. 

Deeply interested in cultural policy and in national and international issues, she has long been actively involved in professional networks. In particular, she served as President of Les Forces Musicales, the employers’ association representing around fifty French orchestras and opera houses. She continues this commitment in Belgium within FEAS (Fédération des Employeurs des Arts de la Scène), where she is Vice-President and coordinates a working group on the prevention of sexual and gender-based violence, moral harassment, and discrimination.

She is regularly invited to take part in international conferences and juries, including the preselection jury of the La Maestra International Conducting Competition at the Philharmonie de Paris in 2021, the IAMA conference at the Vienna Konzerthaus and OrchestraNow! at the National Forum of Music in Wrocław in 2023, as President of the jury of the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal competition in 2024, and at Classical:NEXT in Berlin in 2025.

She is a Chevalier of the French Order of Arts and Letters.