Bill Freimuth

Bill Freimuth serves as Chief Awards Officer for the Recording Academy®. Since 2004, he has worked diligently to maintain the integrity of the GRAMMY Awards® through his stewardship of the six-decade-old awards process.

Freimuth leads a 17-member team in handling the intake of more than 22,000 entries, including verifying their eligibility and genre sorting, and the balloting and nominations process to determine GRAMMY® Award recipients. He is responsible for overseeing more than 40 committees—comprised of up to 70 industry experts each—to ensure that recordings meet eligibility, category-placement, and nomination criteria. He co-produces the GRAMMY Awards Premiere Ceremony®, which presents more than 70 GRAMMY categories and is streamed live internationally. Freimuth is also responsible for managing all proposals for change related to the Awards process through the Awards & Nominations Committee.

Prior to joining the Recording Academy, Freimuth worked as a creative executive in the world of theater as the founding executive director of Los Angeles' Ovation Awards and as manager of New York's Big Apple Circus touring big top production.

He has a diploma from the Virginia Governor's School for the Gifted and graduated summa cum laude from the University of Michigan with a Bachelor of Arts degree.