About Matt
Matt Baker saw his first magician at age 4 (he’s the boy with his mouth agape in this picture) and began performing himself at the age of 10. He has won multiple awards for his magic, including (twice, most recently in 2019) the Greater Atlanta Magician of the Year award. Matt’s specialty is card magic, but he also performs astonishing feats of mind reading and has been known to make impossible things happen with M&Ms, rubber bands, and wedding rings. Matt performs strolling magic at cocktail parties and also does formal close-up and stage shows at banquets, fundraisers, schools, and private events. Matt loves creating original magic routines, and his work has been featured in some of the leading magic journals in the world. His first book on magic, The Buena Vista Shuffle Club, was published in April 2019 and has met with wide acclaim.
Matt was a protegé of the late, great Simon Aronson, and he has performed three times at the invitation-only Fechter’s Finger Flicking Frolic, the world’s premiere close-up magic convention. Matt has recorded both a Penguin Live Act and a Murphy's "At the Table" lecture, and in July 2019, Matt was a featured lecturer at the International Brotherhood of Magicians Annual Convention in Scottsdale, AZ. Matt has performed magic across the U.S., as well as in Colombia, Mexico, Austria, Germany, Italy, Spain, and Japan (he once made a bar waitress in Japan gasp and drop her bottle of sake). Matt was the instructor for Vanishing Inc’s acclaimed “Masterclass” series in September 2022. In 2023, Matt gave a lecture at The Session in London, England, performed six shows at the Chicago Magic Lounge, and appeared on the television show Penn & Teller: Fool Us.
When he’s not baffling and entertaining audiences with his magic, Matt keeps busy with his wife and three children, and a full-time job as a math professor at Georgia Tech. Matt has won numerous awards for his teaching, including the 2010 University System of Georgia Board of Regents Teaching Excellence Award, which was awarded in part for Matt’s innovative use of magic in the classroom. Matt’s research in mathematics has been supported by a Simons Fellowship and numerous grants from the National Science Foundation, and he is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. In his (very limited) spare time, he writes both a magic blog and a math blog.
7 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Matt
In 2018, Matt spent four days in Spain studying magic with Juan Tamariz, the world's greatest living close-up magician.
Matt was once a contestant on the TV show Jeopardy! He didn't win, but he did come in second place and he got a deluxe backyard barbecue smoker out of the deal.
Matt once won a national writing contest, and he took a semester-long poetry workshop with the Poet Laureate of the US.
Matt’s wife, a Peabody and Emmy award-winning television producer, is also an avid gardener and musician.
Matt spent three years as an Assistant Professor at Harvard, and once delivered a math lecture in French during a month-long stint as a Visiting Professor at the University of Paris. Several attendees were overheard saying "Qu'est-ce qu'il a dit?", which according to Matt means "Wow, his French is excellent."
Matt has written several original songs and took guitar lessons from Lisa Bastoni, an award-winning singer-songwriter in Boston.
Matt once bit into a quiche in a small town in southern France and then watched in horror as maggots (and half-maggots) crawled out. This is one reason he doesn’t watch horror movies.