Christopher Dorsey was born in Byron, Georgia. He began his formal guitar training with Douglas Back at Georgia Southwestern University and later continued with John Pell at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee, where he received his Bachelor of Arts degree in Music. He received the Master of Arts in Guitar Performance from Middle Tennessee State University, where he studied with William Yelverton. Under the direction of the distinguished teacher and guitarist Frank Koonce, Chris received his Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Guitar Performance from the School of Music at Arizona State University in 2005. The title of his doctoral dissertation is Guarango como guitarra en tango [Awkward as a Guitar in the Tango]: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of the Guitar in the Argentinean Tango.

Chris has performed in the master classes of William Kanengiser, Dusan Bogdanovic, Jason Vieaux, Evangelos & Liza, David Leisner, Michael Chapdelaine, Javier García Moreno, Celso Machado, Máximo Diego Pujol, and Victor Villadangos. In the summer of 1998, he studied flamenco with guitarist Miguel Ángel Corral in Granada, Spain at Escuela Carmen de las Cuevas. In 2000, the Arizona State University College of Fine Arts and the “Friends” of the ASU Center for Latin American Studies awarded Chris grants to study tango in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he studied with guitarist/composer Hugo Romero. In the fall of 2006, he studied Argentinean folk music and interpretation with composer Marcelo Coronel in Rosario, Argentina. Chris commissioned Coronel to write the solo guitar work Música de los Andes and is also the work’s dedicatee.

Chris is active both as a soloist and as a member of the Santa Fe Guitar Quartet of Argentina. He has recorded one album as a soloist, Antiguo canto: The Music of Marcelo Coronel (2010), and two albums with the quartet: Jouneys (2003) and Wapango (2007).

Chris began teaching classical guitar at the university level in 1996 and has been teaching children and youth since 1999. He has studied the Suzuki approach with Frank Longay. In 2005, Dr. Chris Dorsey established the Dorsey Guitar Studio in Phoenix, Arizona, which offers high-quality instruction in music and classical guitar to children and youth.