Professor Steven Laitz is currently Chair of Music Theory and Analysis, and Assistant Dean for Curricular Initiatives at the Juilliard School. Before this he served from 1989-2014 as a faculty member in the Theory Department at the Eastman School of Music (for seven of those years served as department chair). Laitz also holds the position of Distinguished Visiting Professor at Shanghai Conservatory and in 2012, was appointed Director of the Gail Boyd de Stwolinski Center for Music Theory Pedagogy), Executive Editor of Music Theory Pedagogy Online, and Visiting Professor at the University of Oklahoma in Norman.

For nine seasons, Laitz taught on the piano faculty at the Chautauqua Institution, where he lectured on issues in analysis and performance. He has delivered lectures, keynote addresses, workshops, and performances throughout the United States (including a yearly residency in Honolulu, Hawaii), the Netherlands, Australia (for the Australian Musicological Society in Sydney, and as Resident Music Faculty at the Hale School in Perth), and continues to visit conservatories throughout China.

In 2003 Oxford University Press published Laitz' The Complete Musician: An Integrated Approach to Tonal Theory, Analysis and Listening, which is currently in its fourth edition. In 2016 a Chinese translation of this text will be published by the Hunan Literature and Art Publishing House in Wuhan, China. His second textbook, Graduate Review of Tonal Theory: A Recasting of Common-Practice Harmony, Form, and Counterpoint (co-authored with Christopher Bartlette), appeared in 2009, also for Oxford University Press; it will appear in a second edition in 2017. Laitz is the author of three web courses, created for the Institute for Music Leadership at the Eastman School of Music: "Music Theory Fundamentals in Four Weeks" (in both English and Chinese), "Graduate Music Theory Review" and "eTheory LIVE: Interactive Music Theory Classroom". He is currently creating an integrated online music theory, history, and appreciation course for Juilliard Global Ventures.