He studied at the University of Chicago, the Chicago Musical College, the Peabody Conservatory, the Salzburg Mozarteum and, as a Fulbright Scholar, the Vienna Hochschule für Musik, guided by (among others) Howard Mayer Brown, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Antonio Janigro, Edward Lowinsky, and Frederik Prausnitz.

[1] His involvement with 20th-century art music included many seasons with Ralph Shapey’s Contemporary Chamber Players and founding membership in the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art’s resident ensemble “Twittering Machine.” He has appeared in hundreds of concerts with SCMS ensembles and made over sixty recordings, featuring him as a conductor, cellist, gambist, barytonist and keyboard player for music ranging from the Baroque (Marais, Corelli, Bach) through the Classical (Haydn, Boccherini, Beethoven, Schubert) and Romantic (Mendelssohn, Gade, Spohr) to the early twentieth century (Schönberg, Mahler, Richard Strauss).

Of these, many have won prestigious international awards, including France’s Diapason d'Or and Choc, the “British Music Retailers’ Award for Excellence,” Italy’s Premio Internazionale del Disco Antonio Vivaldi, two GRAMMY® nominations, and numerous “Record of the Month” and “Record of the Year” prizes.

His articles on music and performance practice have appeared in several scholarly journals; his annotations for recordings and concert programs are frequently cited as models in their field.

Slowik serves on the faculties of L’Académie Internationale du Domaine Forget in Québec and the University of Maryland; he has been the Artistic Director of the Baroque Performance Institute at the Oberlin College Conservatory since 1993.