Born and raised in Iran, Bahar Royaee is a music educator and a composer/ sound designer who works within the field of concert music and various media arts. The Boston Arts Review praised Royaee’s “haunting sound design” in her work with live theatre. Royaee’s work has been performed at prominent events such as the Time:Spans 2020 Festival and the 2020 Fromm Foundation Composer Conference, 2022 Tehran Electroacoustic Music Festival, and has won awards such as the Pnea Award, the Roger Session Memorial Composition Award, and the Korourian electroacoustic music award. She has worked with Claire Chase, Suzzane Farrin, International Contemporary Ensemble, Loadbang, Composer Conference Ensemble, Contemporary Insights of Leipzig, Ensemble der gelbe Klang, Guerrilla Opera, Longleash, Mazumal, Kimia Hesabi, Splice Ensemble, to name a few. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in music composition from City University of New York.
Eduardo Aguilar (or Eduardo Ángel Aguilar Vásquez) is a music composer whose work explores process, concepts, ideas, imaginations, perceptions, representations, thoughts, designs, and realities. Aguilar work tends to the investigation and exploration of specific ordinary phenomena by abstracting its elements, specifically by configuring a compositional synthesis between what could belong to the realm of visual and/ or sound, to understand them indistinctly in a more fundamental but equally detailed way in terms of energy. Honors and awards include: Talea Ensemble, recording (USA, 2024); Banff Center, Independent binational project (Canada, 2019/2022); JACK Studio, resident (USA, 2019); Geophysics Institute UNAM and National Seismological Service SSN –“Tectonic” and “Volcanic”– Seismicity Awards (Mexico, 2019); Impronta NEW Special Ensemble Prize (Germany, 2019); SORBONNE UNIVERSITÉ – UNAM, collaborative project on new approaches to pedagogy, technology and creation (France-Mex 2018-2019); Arditti Quartet FIMNME workshop composer selected (Mexico, 2018); Prize of Research and Artistic Creation of the Science and Art University Museum MUCA-UNAM (Mexico, 2017); Toluca Philharmonic Orchestra Composition Contest Winner Prize (Mexico, 2016); 15 Best of SBALZ International Brass Composition Competition (Spain, 2015); among others.
Vicente Atria is a Chilean composer and drummer. His music riffs on a wide range of idioms, from microtonal renaissance dances to Korean sanjo, creating playful, vibrant sonic worlds. A Deutscher Jazzpreis recipient, Atria’s work has been commissioned or performed by the Sun Ra Arkestra, Ensemble Musikfabrik, JACK Quartet, Wet Ink Ensemble, Ensemble Proton Bern, Yarn/Wire, and International Contemporary Ensemble. He has been featured in venues and festivals including Moers Festival (Germany), Skanu Mezs (Latvia), MATA Festival (NY), Wigmore Hall (UK), The Shed, Roulette Intermedium, The Jazz Gallery, and The Stone (all NY). He is a recipient of a 2025 Fondation des Treilles Musical Composition Prize, a 2024 Busoni Komponistpreis (nominated), a Wet Ink Ensemble AIR residence (2023), a MacDowell Fellowship (2023), an ASCAP Herb Alpert Young Jazz Composer Award (2022), an ACF Create award (2021), The Shed Open Call commission (2019), Chilean Ministry of Culture Fondo de la Música grants (2022 and 2020), and an ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award (2016 finalist). He holds a DMA in Composition from Columbia University.
Mattie Barbier is an LA-based musician and sonic researcher focused on experimental intonation, latent acoustic environments, and the physicality of their instrument. Their playing has been described by the LA Times as “intense, brilliant, virtuosic growling,” by The Wire as “exploring the nooks of instrumental tone far beyond the reach of most mortals,” and by The New Yorker as a “diabolically inventive trombonist-composer.”
Barbier collaborates with artists such as Weston Olencki, Ellen Arkbro, Clara Iannotta, Sarah Davachi, Michelle Lou, Wolfgang von Schweinitz, Jacob Kirkegaard, and Katherine Young. They have premiered works by George Lewis, Catherine Lamb, Liza Lim, Lester St. Louis, Kevin Drumm, Kaori Suzuki, Raven Chacon, Nate Wooley, and even British pop icon Scott Walker. As a soloist, they’ve performed with the Helsinki Philharmonic, SWR Symphonieorchester, and Wild Up.
A member of RAGE Thormbones, Wild Up, echoi, Diapason, and an active soloist and improviser on low brass and bagpipes, Barbier teaches at CalArts. They have created and presented work for the Museum of Jurassic Technology, Getty Center and Villa, Monday Evening Concerts, Roulette, San Francisco Exploratorium, Indexical, RedCat, Mahler Chamber Orchestra, and others, including a collaboration with holographer Tristan Duke. Festival appearances include Borealis (NO), Darmstadt and Donaueschinger (DE), Musica Nova Helsinki (FI), Maerzmusik (DE), Ojai Music Festival, and more.
Barbier has held guest residencies at institutions including Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Columbia, NYU, UCSD, and University of Chicago. Their recordings appear on labels such as Sofa Music, Dinzu Artifacts, Carrier, Populist, Mode, Hat Hut, New Focus, Kairos, and Domino.
Danielle Ondarza is a highly sought-after French hornist, educator, and recording artist based in Los Angeles. With a career spanning orchestral performance, chamber music, education, and media recording, she creates works that reflect both artistic excellence and a deep commitment to music education.
Ondarza performs regularly with ensembles such as the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Los Angeles Opera, and the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, and holds tenured or contracted positions with the Los Angeles Ballet Orchestra, Los Angeles Master Chorale, and Opera Santa Barbara. Her freelance career has included performances with nearly every major Southern California orchestra, as well as chamber appearances with Forte Brass, Jacaranda, Ensemble Green, and the Hear Now Festival.
As a studio musician, Ondarza’s horn playing can be heard on a wide range of film, television, and video game scores, including Coco, Finding Dory, Man of Steel, Nope, League of Legends, and World of Warcraft, as well as albums by Daft Punk, Sia, John Legend, Bruce Springsteen, and Mitski. She has performed live with artists including Andrea Bocelli, Mariah Carey, Billie Eilish, Alicia Keys, and Josh Groban, and has appeared on major televised events such as The Academy Awards, The Voice, and MTV Video Music Awards.
An experienced educator, she serves on the faculties of Pomona College, Occidental College, the Colburn School, and the Pasadena Conservatory of Music, where she also chairs the Winds, Brass & Percussion department. She has designed and taught music courses at Cal Poly Pomona, the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, and numerous summer and outreach programs.
Ben Cortez Richter, originally from Pleasanton, CA in the San Francisco Bay, has worked internationally as an opera stage director and assistant director. Having received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music and completed his master’s degree work at Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, both in Voice/Opera, he decided to leave the stage and pursue a career as a stage director. While living in Germany before relocating to Boston in 2020, Ben held several first assistant director positions at Oper Frankfurt, Badisches Staatstheater where he assisted and remounted beloved productions. He also served as and continues his work as a freelance assistant director and scenic staging choreographer at such theaters as Oper Köln, Staatstheater Berlin and Tiroler Festspiel.
Richter has assisted Barrie Kosky, Lydia Steier, David Herrmann, and Katharina Thoma among other notable European and American stage directors. In 2023, he joined the San Francisco Symphony in scenically coordinating performances of Pan by Marcos Balter with flutist Claire Chase in San Francisco and Cité de la Musique in Paris. During those performances, Ben led community members of both cities through staging called for in Balter’s moving piece. He has also created and stage directed numerous condensed operas for children featuring German language dialogue including La bohème, L’elisir d’amore, and Don Giovanni. Currently serving as Director of Artistic Operations at Boston Lyric Opera, Richter is thrilled to continue his scenic collaboration work with the BSO.
Dan Rosenboom is an internationally recognized trumpet player, composer, and producer. He is known as a prolific member of the Los Angeles creative music scene, having released more than 25 albums of original music as a solo artist and bandleader. He has supported over 60 artists across over 100 releases on his label, Orenda Records. Rosenboom is a proud member of the Hollywood studio musician community and has recorded for over 200 major film and television soundtracks with such notable composers as John Williams, Danny Elfman, James Newton Howard, Alan Silvestri, Alexandre Desplat, and many more. He has also performed with the LA Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and the Los Angeles Opera. He studied at the Eastman School of Music, CalArts, and UCLA, where he earned advanced degrees in music.
As a composer, Rosenboom has been recognized by the American Composers Forum, ASCAP, the Meet the Composer Foundation, and the Yvar Mikhashoff Trust for New Music. As a bandleader, he has brought his music to the Monterey Jazz Festival, Angel City Jazz Festival, Jazzfestival Saalfelden and Jazz em Agosto. Rosenboom’s band Burning Ghosts has drawn international attention for their rousing blend of experimental jazz, punk, and metal as response to modern socio-political ills. To date they have released four albums, including one on John Zorn’s legendary Tzadik label, and have toured in the US and Europe.
Rosenboom is an advocate for progressive music education. He currently teaches at UCLA and his trumpet pedagogy book, The Boom Method: Universal Fundamentals for Trumpet and Other Instruments, Vol. 1, was published by Balqhuidder Music in 2019. His writing has also been published in John Zorn’s Arcana IX: Musicians on Music on Tzadik. Rosenboom is proud to be an endorsing artist for Yamaha Trumpets, Bob Reeves Brass Mouthpieces, AEA Microphones, Horn FX, and Kirlin Cables.
His performances as a guitarist and conductor have been hailed as ‘sparkling…delivered superbly’ (San Francisco Chronicle), ‘ravishing’ (San Diego Union Tribune), and ‘an amazing tour de force’ (San Diego Story), and he has recorded on the MicroFest, Summit, Innova, Centaur, Naxos, Albany, Old King Cole, Vienna Modern Masters, Carrier, and Tzadik labels. His research interests include contemporary music performance and pedagogy, musical modernism, and the apocalyptic paradigm as manifested in varying phenomena—literature, music, and art.
Wesley Sumpter is one of the most in-demand percussionists in the United States. He has performed with some of the world’s leading orchestras including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco, National, and Atlanta Symphonies, Mainly Mozart Festival Orchestra, the Cabrillo Festival, Lakes Area Music Festival and the BBC Philharmonic in Manchester, UK. He has played under renown conductors such as Gustavo Dudamel, Esa Pekka Salonen, Zubin Mehta and many more. During his time with the LA Phil, he has shared the stage with some of the biggest stars in music like: Christina Aguilera, H.E.R., Katy Perry, Herbie Hancock, Barry Manilow, Wynton Marsalis, John Williams, and Snarky Puppy. He has also performed in some of world’s most iconic venues like: Walt Disney Concert Hall, Philharmonie de Paris, Zankel Hall & Stern Auditorium of Carnegie Hall, and more.
Wesley Sumpter is one of the most in-demand percussionists in the United States. He has performed with some of the world’s leading orchestras including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco, National, and Atlanta Symphonies, Mainly Mozart Festival Orchestra, the Cabrillo Festival, Lakes Area Music Festival and the BBC Philharmonic in Manchester, UK. He has played under renown conductors such as Gustavo Dudamel, Esa Pekka Salonen, Zubin Mehta and many more. During his time with the LA Phil, he has shared the stage with some of the biggest stars in music like: Christina Aguilera, H.E.R., Katy Perry, Herbie Hancock, Barry Manilow, Wynton Marsalis, John Williams, and Snarky Puppy. He has also performed in some of world’s most iconic venues like: Walt Disney Concert Hall, Philharmonie de Paris, Zankel Hall & Stern Auditorium of Carnegie Hall, and more.
Wesley Sumpter is one of the most in-demand percussionists in the United States. He has performed with some of the world’s leading orchestras including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco, National, and Atlanta Symphonies, Mainly Mozart Festival Orchestra, the Cabrillo Festival, Lakes Area Music Festival and the BBC Philharmonic in Manchester, UK. He has played under renown conductors such as Gustavo Dudamel, Esa Pekka Salonen, Zubin Mehta and many more. During his time with the LA Phil, he has shared the stage with some of the biggest stars in music like: Christina Aguilera, H.E.R., Katy Perry, Herbie Hancock, Barry Manilow, Wynton Marsalis, John Williams, and Snarky Puppy. He has also performed in some of world’s most iconic venues like: Walt Disney Concert Hall, Philharmonie de Paris, Zankel Hall & Stern Auditorium of Carnegie Hall, and more.
Wesley Sumpter is one of the most in-demand percussionists in the United States. He has performed with some of the world’s leading orchestras including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco, National, and Atlanta Symphonies, Mainly Mozart Festival Orchestra, the Cabrillo Festival, Lakes Area Music Festival and the BBC Philharmonic in Manchester, UK. He has played under renown conductors such as Gustavo Dudamel, Esa Pekka Salonen, Zubin Mehta and many more. During his time with the LA Phil, he has shared the stage with some of the biggest stars in music like: Christina Aguilera, H.E.R., Katy Perry, Herbie Hancock, Barry Manilow, Wynton Marsalis, John Williams, and Snarky Puppy. He has also performed in some of world’s most iconic venues like: Walt Disney Concert Hall, Philharmonie de Paris, Zankel Hall & Stern Auditorium of Carnegie Hall, and more.
Sumpter received his bachelor’s degree from the University of Georgia and started his master’s at the University of Southern California before beginning the inaugural Resident Fellows program with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. His teachers include Timothy Adams jr., Kimberly Toscano, James Babor, Joseph Pereira and Matthew Howard.
Pianist Alex Peh collaborates with musicians globally in search of shared resonances that emerge from friendship and connection. A 2021 Fulbright Global Scholar and 2019 Asian Cultural Council Fellow, he has worked with notable musicians and composers such as Claire Chase, Susie Ibarra, Anna Clyne, U Yee Nwe, Hafez Modirzadeh, Senem Pirler, and Phyllis Chen. Peh’s work has been presented internationally and throughout the United States.
Peh is a member of Talking Gong, an improvising trio with percussionist, Susie Ibarra and flutist, Claire Chase. They released their debut album in 2019, Talking Gong, on New Focus Recordings available on all major streaming platforms. The trio has performed at Carnegie Zankel Hall, Public Theater, Roulette Intermedium, and BRIC in New York City.
In 2021 Peh received a Fulbright Global Scholar fellowship that allowed him to connect with Greek pianist and musicologist Nikos Ordoulidis in Naoussa, Greece; Burmese pianist Ne Myo Aung in Bangkok, Thailand and Pooyan Azadeh in Halle, Germany. Together they created a new album of piano music, Attune, on Habitat Sounds, and a companion ethnographic film Intermittent Attunement in collaboration with Dr. Lauren Meeker, Alyson Hummer and Madelyn Colonna. Excerpts of the film and album were premiered at National Sawdust, Brooklyn NYC. Intermittent Attunement was selected for screening by the Ethnografilm festival in Paris, France at the Club D’Etoile.
Peh has received numerous grants to support his work such as Arts Midhudson, New York State Council of the Arts Grant, and New Music USA. Notably, he received a National Endowment for the Arts project grant that funded new compositions in afro/asian tuning systems for the piano by Ramin Zoufonoun and Hafez Modirzadeh.
Peh received his musical training from Indiana and Northwestern Universities where he worked with Arnaldo Cohen, Menahem Pressler, Sylvia Wang and Evelyne Brancart. He attended the Banff, Aspen and Tanglewood music festivals where he worked with Emanuel Ax, Pamela Frank, Claude Frank, Ignat Solzhenitsyn, and Peter Serkin. He performed Stravinsky’s Les Noces under the baton of Charles Dutoit and the Tanglewood Festival Choir. He is an associate professor of piano at SUNY New Paltz, and associate chair of the music department.
Michael Kento Matsuno is a flutist whose work traverses the classical canon, contemporary music, improvisation, music psychology, and 20th-century history. He can be heard performing throughout Southern California and holds positions as lecturer at Chapman University and flute studio instructor at CalArts and Pierce College.
Matsuno has appeared with a wide range of ensembles throughout the US, including the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble, ECHOI, Red Fish Blue Fish, San Diego Symphony, Slee Sinfonietta, [Switch~ Ensemble], and Wild Up. He has been featured as a guest artist at the Center for 21st Century Music at SUNY Buffalo, Harvard University, Jacaranda Music, June in Buffalo, Monday Evening Concerts, and Neofonía Festival de Música Nueva Ensenada. Matsuno has also performed his own solo compositions, which explore long forms and emergent musical structures in physical decay, on experimental series such as Weirdo Night, High Desert Soundings, and La Rara Noche.
As a researcher, Matsuno is concerned with human relationships to music and their narratives. His dissertation is a biography of the California E.A.R. Unit (1981-2012), one of Los Angeles’ first standalone groups dedicated to avant-garde chamber music. It examines institutional developments in Los Angeles beginning in the 1980s, including the creation of a contemporary music curriculum at CalArts. Matsuno also published an original study in Psychology of Music exploring personalized music-listening strategies by autistic adults. His other writing has appeared in Naxos Musicology International and Now That’s What I Call Poetry. Most recently, Matsuno served as a co-editor for Letters to Home: Art and Writing by Nikkei LGBTQ+ and Allies, a volume of community reflections on acceptance and belonging, self-published by Okaeri.
Matsuno is a graduate of UC San Diego (MA, DMA) and the University of Southern California (BM). He gratefully received mentorship from Nadine Asin, Anthony Burr, John Fonville, Jann Pasler, and Jim Walker.
Praised for her “expressive and captivating performance” (GRAMMY.com), bassist Kathryn Schulmeister brings radiant energy to her creative musical practice ranging from classical to experimental. With a fearless curiosity for collaborative environments, Schulmeister’s enthusiasm for seeking opportunities to integrate improvisation, movement and theatre into her creative practice have led her to thrive as an active performer in festivals and venues around the world.
Schulmeister is a member of several contemporary music ensembles including the renowned Australian ELISION Ensemble, Fonema Consort (NYC), and the Echoi Ensemble (LA). She has performed as a guest artist with various adventurous international ensembles such as Klangforum Wien, Ensemble MusikFabrik, Delirium Musicum, Ensemble Dal Niente, and Ensemble Vertixe Sonora.
Equally passionate and experienced as an orchestral musician, Schulmeister served as a core member of the Hawaii Symphony Orchestra for three consecutive seasons from 2014-2017 and has performed with the Ojai Festival Orchestra, Phoenix Symphony, New West Symphony, California Chamber Orchestra, Lucerne Festival Alumni Orchestra, Pacific Lyric Opera, Maui Chamber Orchestra, and Hawaii Opera Theater.
Schulmeister received her Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Contemporary Music Performance from the University of California San Diego, Master of Music degree from McGill University, and Bachelor of Music degree from the New England Conservatory of Music.
In Fall 2023, Schulmeister joined the faculty of the University of the Pacific Conservatory of Music as Assistant Professor of Practice in String Bass.
Born in Bucharest, Filipino-American Levy Marcel Ingles Lorenzo, Jr. works at the intersection of music, art, and technology. On an international scale, his body of work spans electronics design, sound engineering, instrument building, installation art, improvisation, and percussion performance. With a primary focus on inventing new instruments, he prototypes, composes, and performs new electronic music. As an art consultant, Levy designs interactive electronics ranging from small sculptures to large-scale public art installations with artists such as Alvin Lucier, Christine Sun Kim, Ligorano-Reese, Autumn Knight, and Leo Villareal. As a musician, he has worked with artists such as Peter Evans, Tyshawn Sorey, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, Ryuichi Sakamoto, George Lewis, Henry Threadgill, and Claire Chase. As a sound engineer, he is in demand as a specialist in the realization of complete electro-acoustic concerts with non-traditional configurations. A core member of the acclaimed International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), he fulfills multiple roles as percussionist, electronics performer, and sound engineer. His work has been featured at STEIM, REWIRE, MIT Media Lab, Harvestworks, Banff Centre, Harvard University, G4TV, Grey Group, Bose, Amazon Studios, BBC, The New York Times, the Hermitage and Burning Man. He recently made his soloist debut with the NY Philharmonic for the reopening concerts of David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center.
Lorenzo earned degrees as Master of Electrical & Computer Engineering from Cornell University, and Doctor of Musical Arts in Percussion Performance from Stony Brook University. He has presented numerous workshops and lectures on electronic musical instrument design and performance practice. Dr. Lorenzo holds a position as Professor of Creative Technologies at The New School, College of Performing Arts where he is director of the Nstrument Lab.
Liza Lim is a composer, educator and researcher whose music focusses on collaborative and transcultural practices. Beauty, rage & noise, ecological connection, and female spiritual lineages are at the heart of recent works such as Sex Magic (2020) for flutist Claire Chase; the orchestral cycle, Annunciation Triptych: Sappho, Mary, Fatimah (2019-22), and Multispecies Knots of Ethical Time (2023) for gestural performer, film and ensemble. She is interested in the plural creativities of collaborating with the ‘more-than-human’ and in speculative questions around the sentiency of things including time, notation and of music itself. Her large-scale cycle Extinction Events and Dawn Chorus (2018) has found especially wide resonance internationally and highlights ecological listening to more-than-human realms.
Liza Lim has received commissions from some of the world’s pre-eminent orchestras and ensembles including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, Concertgebouw Orkest, BBC, BBC Scottish, SWR and WDR Symphony Orchestras, Sydney and Melbourne Symphony Orchestras, Ensemble Musikfabrik, ELISION, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Ensemble Modern, Klangforum Wien, International Contemporary Ensemble, Arditti String Quartet and the JACK Quartet. She was Resident Composer with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in 2005 and 2006. Her music has been featured at the Berliner Festspiele, Spoleto Festival, Miller Theatre New York, Festival d’Automne à Paris, Venice Biennale, Lucerne Festival, and at all the major Australian festivals. She was named ‘Composer of the Year’ in the 2024 OPUS KLASSIK (Germany) and awarded the 13th Roche Commission to compose for the 2026 Lucerne Festival (Switzerland). Prizes recognising her wide-ranging career and vitality of compositional practice include the Australia Council’s Don Banks Award (2018), the ‘Happy New Ears Prize’ of the Hans and Gertrud Zender Foundation (2021) and the 2022 APRA AMCOS National Luminary Award. She was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in the 2023 King’s Birthday honours for her contribution to Australian music. She was DAAD Artist-in-Berlin in 2007-08 and Composer-in-Residence at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in 2021-22. A founding member of the Academy of the Arts of the World in Cologne (2012-2016), she was also elected a member of the Akademie der Künste Berlin in 2022.
Liza Lim is Professor of Composition and holds the Sculthorpe Chair of Australian Music at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music. She is the first musician to be awarded an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship (2025-29) to lead a five-year program designed to encourage engagement with urgent climate and social issues through music. Her initiatives with the Sydney Con’s ‘Composing Women’ gender equity program have had far-reaching impact on commissioning, performance, and next generation leadership in Australian music. The program and her leadership were recognised with the 2020 ClassicalNEXT Award, Rotterdam. She is visiting Endowed Guest Professor at the Frankfurt HfMDK for 3 periods in 2024-25. She has led composition masterclasses and summer courses all over the world, eg: Darmstadt, Royaumont, Shanghai, Boston, Viitasaari, Dublin, Banff, and given conference keynotes and distinguished guest lectures at Kunstuniversität Graz, Oxford, Harvard, UCSD and the University of Sydney amongst others. She established the HCR CD label (now part of NMC Records), Divergence Press and CeReNeM Journal at the University of Huddersfield where she was Director of the Centre for Research in New Music (2008-2017). She has continually reinvented her compositional language and practice across a substantial output that spans intimate and collaborative instrumental solos, to chamber and orchestral works, to five strikingly different operas. Her catalogue of compositions has been published by Casa Ricordi (Milan, London, Berlin) since 1992. British writer Tim Rutherford-Johnson’s comprehensive book The Music of Liza Lim was published in 2022 by Wildbird Music, Sydney. Her discography extends to 40 CDs including 10 portrait albums released on KAIROS, WERGO, New Focus Recordings, HCR/NMC and HartArt. Album releases and premieres of her work have consistently appeared on The New Yorker’s annual Notable Performances and Recordings of the Year lists 2013-2021 & 2023.
Liza Lim studied at the Victorian College of the Arts (BA, music), University of Melbourne (MMus) and the University of Queensland (PhD). She undertook postgraduate composition studies with Ton de Leeuw at the Sweelinck Conservatorium Amsterdam in 1987. Other composition teachers and academic mentors include Dr Rosalind McMillan AM, Dr Richard David Hames, Riccardo Formosa, Prof. Philip Bračanin, Prof. Brian Ferneyhough, Prof. Malcolm Gilles AM, and Prof. Eric Clarke amongst others.
The artistry of internationally, renowned Sheng virtuoso Wu Wei reaches far beyond the traditional boundaries of his more than 3000-year-old Chinese instrument and brings it well into the 21st century.
The Sheng, a mouth organ, formed out of a bundle of bamboo reeds and cased in a metal bowl, sounds as the singing phoenix from a Chinese legend: silvery and fleeting as the wind.
Wu Wei’s radiant and transparent tone as well as the infinite possibilities offered by his instrument in terms of melody, harmony, rhythm, polyphony have led him to collaborating with many artists and ensembles in traditional, chamber or orchestral settings, improvising in solo concerts or with jazz big Bands, playing electronic music as well as taking part to minimal, baroque music performances.
Wu Wei’s desire to experiment with new sound and types of musical expression and his extraordinary capacity to create an individual world out of each performance are reflected in his collaborations with distinguished composers writing concertos for Sheng and orchestra especially for him: Huang Ruo (The color of yellow – 2007), Guus Janssen (Four Songs – 2008), Unsuk Chin (Su – 2009), Jukka Tiensuu (Teoton – 2015), Bernd Richard Deutsch (Phaenomena – 2019), Ondrej Adamek (Lost Prayer Book – 2019), Donghong Shin (Anecdote – 2019), Enjott Schneider (change – 2003 and several other concerti).
In the last decade, Wu Wei has performed with orchestras such as the Berlin Philharmonic under Kent Nagano, the Seoul Philharmonic under Myung Whun Chung, the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Gustavo Dudamel, BBC Symphony under Ilan Volkov, the Cabrillo Festival and Sao Paulo Symphony under Marin Alsop, the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic and the New York Philharmonic under Susanna Mälkki, the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic under Jaap van Zweden and Edo de Waart, Helsinki Philharmonic under Matthias Pintscher, ensembles such as the Holland Baroque, the Ensemble intercontemporain, the Atlas Ensemble and the NDR Big Band, and soloists like Guus Jansen (organ), Wang Li (Jew’s harp) or Pascal Contet (accordion).
He is regularly invited by international festivals such as the BBC Prom’s in London, Festival d’Automne à Paris, Donaueschinger Musiktage, Edinburgh International Festival, Suntory Hall Summer Festival Tokyo, Dresdner Musikfestspiele, Festival Achtbrücken Cologne, Grafenegg Festival, Lincoln Center Festival New York.
Upcoming events include Wu Wei’s debuts with the New York Philharmonic and Sao Paulo Symphony orchestra in 2019, the Chinese premiere in Beijing of Bernd Richard Deutsch’s Sheng concerto Phaenomena with the China NCPA Orchestra under Jia Lü, the world premiere of a new Sheng concerto by Enjott Schneider with the Taipei Chinese Orchestra and a tour to America and Canada with the Chinese NCPA Orchestra in 2020.
As a composer, Wu Wei has received commissions from the Fondation Royaumont, Musica Viva in Munich, the Hanse Culture Foundation, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Cultural Foundation of the Free State of Saxony and several other institutions.
With Martin Stegner (viola) und Matthew McDonald (double bass), both members of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, he founded the Wu Wei Trio which appears each season in the Chamber Music Hall of the Berlin Philharmonie. As a founder of the Berlin based Ensemble Asianart, he likes to share transcultural programs with instrumentalists from all around the world. He is an ideal partner for interdisciplinary projects involving literature, dance, theatre, architecture.
Wu Wei has recorded for Deutsche Gramophon, Sony Classical, Harmonia Mundi, Wergo, Pentatone and several of his CDs and DVDs have been distinguished by international Awards: International Classical Music Award 2015 and BBC Music Magazine Award 2015 for the Unsuk Chin concertos CD with Deutsche Gramophon, the German Critic Award in 2012 for the “AsianArt Ensemble” CD to note a few.
He also received the Best Sheng Soloist Award China in 2017, the Herald Angels Award 2011 at the International Festival Edinburgh, the Global Root German World Music Prize 2004 in Rudolstadt (Germany).
Wu Wei was born in 1970 in Gaoyou (China). He studied at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music and started his career in 1993 as a Sheng soloist in China where he performed among others with the Chinese Music Orchestra Shanghaï. In 1995, he was selected by the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) and FNS (Friedrich Naumann Foundation) to take part in a four-year scholarship which brought him to Berlin, where he is still currently living. Since 2013, Wu Wei has been a Professor teaching the Sheng at the Shanghaï Conservatory of Music.
M.A. Tiesenga is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice delves into the intricate interplay of procedure and enaction within collaborative performance contexts, deftly shaping these dynamics through various idioms. Inspired by an affinity for the outdoors, Tiesenga draws analogies between these concepts and the art of cartography, illuminating the parallels between a map and a musical score. This exploration opens doors to musically navigate, inhabit, and realize theoretical terrains.
As a composer, visual artist, sound artist, multi-instrumentalist, and improviser, Tiesenga merges these creative identities by embracing the potential of expanded notation systems as an inquisition into new sonic possibilities. Their lifelong passion for collage, maps, puzzles, and asemic languages fuels an enchantment with encoding and decoding musical territories, allowing lexical approaches to transform into palpable expressions. Within their artistic vision, Tiesenga seeks to convey inner worlds where protocols and rules converge with intuition and mystique.
Tiesenga approaches sound-making as a collaborative exchange – central to Tiesenga’s artistic inspiration is the creation of works that cultivate connection and reciprocity in contemporary music. Their understanding of the musical score as both an art object and a notated intention for performance/action facilitates the construction of modular, living landscapes that reflect the people and spaces present. Graphic scores, for Tiesenga, serve as intermediaries bridging Karreideas and actions, visual and aural experiences, and the externalization of internal processes. As an ardent experimentalist, they find inspiration and excitement in exploring improvisation and indeterminacy, elevating and weaving performers’ agency by inviting personal interpretation into the fabric of a composition. Informed by their own extensive performance practice, Tiesenga is committed to crafting works that engage both performers and audiences alike to see their environment a little differently.
Tiesenga’s compositional collaborations include work with the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, Wild Up, Théâtre Musical Tokyo, Long Beach Opera, Kunsthalle for Music, SPEAK Percussion, Dog Star Orchestra, Ensemble Supermusique, and ensembles at the Eastman School of Music, New England Conservatory, California Institute for the Arts, Yale University, and Darmstädter Ferienkurse.
M.A. Tiesenga holds an MFA in Composition – Experimental Sound Practices and an MFA in Experimental Animation with a Concentration in Integrated Media from California Institute of the Arts, where they studied with Michael Pisaro, Sara Roberts, Eyvind Kang, Alexander Stewart, Pia Borg, and Tom Leeser. Previously, Tiesenga earned a Bachelor of Music from the Eastman School of Music in saxophone performance under the guidance of Dr. Chien-Kwan Lin.
Joshua Nathan Rubin served as the Program Director and then Artistic Director of the International Contemporary Ensemble from 2011-2018, where he oversaw the creative direction of more than one hundred concerts per season in the United States and abroad. As a clarinetist, the New York Times has praised him as, “incapable of playing an inexpressive note.”
Joshua has worked closely with many of the prominent composers and performers of our time, including George Crumb, Matana Roberts, Alvin Lucier, David Lang, Chaya Czernowin, Du Yun, Christian Wolff, Cory Smythe, George Lewis, Steven Schick, Kaija Saariaho, Craig Taborn, Pauline Oliveros, Okkyung Lee, Nathan Davis, Tyshawn Sorey, John Zorn, and Mario Davidovsky. Joshua can be heard on recordings from the Nonesuch, Kairos, New Focus, Mode, Cedille, Naxos, Bridge, New Amsterdam, and Tzadik labels. His album There Never is No Light, available on the Tundra label, highlights music that uses technology to capture the human engagement of the performer and the listener.
This season he will perform on modern and historical clarinets in New York with the International Contemporary Ensemble, Teatro Nuovo, the American Composers Orchestra, at Harvard University, in Los Angeles with Wild Up, Monday Evening Concerts, Tesserae Baroque, at the Ojai Music Festival with Rhiannon Giddens, and in Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Berlin, Miami, Boston, Houston, Kansas City, San Diego, and Chicago.
His clarinet studies were mentored by Lawrence McDonald, Mark Nuccio, and Steven Cohen. He served on the faculty of the Banff Music Centre’s Ensemble Evolution summer program from 2016-2019. Rubin is on the faculty of soundSCAPE Festival and Ensemble Evolution. He serves on the faculty of the College of the Performing Arts at The New School and is Artist-in-Residence at University of California Santa Cruz in 2024.
Joshua holds degrees in Biology and Clarinet from Oberlin College and Conservatory, and a Master’s degree from the Mannes School of Music.
His passion for technology in arts led Joshua to develop LUIGI, management software that is available to ensembles and other arts organizations who value transparency and collective management, as well as his ongoing work to make electronic music technologies easier to use for performers and composers. He maintains an artistic presence in New York and Los Angeles.
Ross Karre (he/him b. 1983 in Michigan) is a percussionist, filmmaker, and producer based in Oberlin, OH and New York City. He is the associate professor of percussion at Oberlin Conservatory. After completing his Doctorate in Music at UCSD with Steven Schick, Ross formalized his visual studies with a Master of Fine Arts. He is a percussionist for the International Contemporary Ensemble where he was artistic director from 2016 to 2022. He has performed regularly with red fish blue fish, Third Coast Percussion (Chicago), and Yarn/Wire (NYC). He has performed at major festivals all over the world, including the Mostly Mozart Festival (NYC), the Holland Festival (Netherlands), Ojai Festival (CA), LA Phil Noon to Midnight, Lucerne Festival, Taipei International Percussion Festival, Big Ears (TN), MONA FOMA (Tasmania), Diskotek (Greenland), and Music Today Biennial (Brazil). 10.67 Cycles, Karre’s solo album featuring the music of Ash Fure and Pauline Oliveros, is available on Bandcamp. His video design work has been presented all over the world in prestigious venues such as the Kulturkirche Liebfrauen Duisburg, Muziekgebouw Amsterdam, BBC Scotland, Western Front, MCA Chicago, the Park Avenue Armory, the Kennedy Center, The Kitchen, Roulette Intermedium, Miller Theatre at Columbia University, and the National Gallery of Art. Karre’s archival documentary and documentation work preserves unique moments in the creative processes of Claire Chase, Pauline Oliveros, Vijay Iyer, Steven Schick, Matthias Kaul, Fritz Hauser, and creative collaborations of Third Coast Percussion, Yarn/Wire, ICEensemble, Mount Tremper Arts, Baryshnikov Arts Center, and the Oberlin Percussion Group.
Two-time GRAMMY®-nominated cellist Seth Parker Woods has established his reputation as a versatile artist and innovator across multiple genres, prompting The New York Times to write, “Woods is an artist rooted in classical music, but whose cello is a vehicle that takes him, and his concertgoers, on wide-ranging journeys.” Woods has served on the faculty of the Thornton School of Music at The University of Southern California since 2022 and was appointed to the Robert Mann Chair in Strings and Chamber Music in 2024.
Among the highlights of his 2024-2025 season, Woods performs in the world premiere of Nathalie Joachim’s new cello concerto, Had to Be, at Spoleto Festival USA, later performing its New York premiere in his debut with the New York Philharmonic. He makes his Los Angeles Philharmonic debut in the world premiere of a new cello concerto by Julia Adolphe. A core member of the music collective Wild Up, Woods is featured as soloist in the group’s Eastman Vol. 4: The Holy Presence, released June 2024 on New Amsterdam Records, and was nominated alongside the group for a 2023 GRAMMY® Award.
During the 2023-2024 season, Woods brought his GRAMMY®-nominated, autobiographical tour-de-force Difficult Grace to San Diego and Philadelphia, following the world premiere at 92NY and performances at UCLA and Chicago’s Harris Theater. Difficult Grace was released as an album on Cedille Records in 2023 and nominated for the 2024 GRAMMY® Award for Best Classical Instrumental Solo. Highlights of last season include performances with Hilary Hahn at Konzerthaus Dortmund in Germany and touring a new version of John Adams’ El Niño: Nativity Reconsidered with American Modern Opera Company (AMOC).
In addition to his post at The University of Southern California, Woods serves on the artist faculty of the Music Academy of the West each summer. He holds degrees from Brooklyn College and Musik Akademie der Stadt Basel, as well as a PhD from the University of Huddersfield.
Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Craig Taborn has been performing piano and electronic music in the jazz, improvisational, and creative music scene for over 25 years. He has experience composing for and performing in a wide variety of situations including jazz, new music, electronic, rock, noise and avant-garde contexts.
Taborn has played and recorded with many luminaries in the fields of jazz, improvised, new music and electronic music including Roscoe Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith, Lester Bowie, Dave Holland, Tim Berne, John Zorn, Evan Parker, Steve Coleman, David Torn, Chris Potter, William Parker, Vijay Iyer, Kris Davis, Nicole Mitchell, Susie Ibarra, Ikue Mori, Carl Craig, Dave Douglas, Meat Beat Manifesto, Dan Weiss, Chris Lightcap, Gerald Cleaver, and Rudresh Manhathappa.
Taborn is currently occupied creating and performing music for solo piano performance (Avenging Angel), piano trio (Craig Taborn Trio), an electronic project (Junk Magic), the Daylight Ghosts Quartet, a piano/drums/electronics duo with Dave King (Heroic Enthusiasts) and a new trio with Tomeka Reid and Ches Smith as well as piano duo collaborations with Vijay Iyer (The Transitory Poems), Kris Davis (Octopus) and Cory Smythe. He is also a member of the instrumental electronic art-pop group Golden Valley is Now and performs frequently on solo electronics. Taborn lives in Brooklyn.
Percussionist, conductor, and author Steven Schick was born in Iowa and raised in a farming family. Hailed by Alex Ross in the New Yorker as, “one of our supreme living virtuosos, not just of percussion but of any instrument,” he has championed contemporary percussion music for nearly 50 years, and in 2014 was inducted into the Percussive Arts Society Hall of Fame.
Steven Schick is music director emeritus of the La Jolla Symphony and Chorus, serving as its music director from 2006–22, and the artistic director of the Breckenridge Music Festival. He has guest conducted the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Milwaukee Symphony, Ensemble Modern, the International Contemporary Ensemble, and the Asko/Schönberg Ensemble. He was artistic director of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (2010–18) and directed programs at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity from 2009–19, the last three as co-artistic director, with Claire Chase, of the Summer Classical Music program. He was the music director of the 2015 Ojai Music Festival.
In 2020, Schick won the Ditson Conductor’s Award, given by Columbia University for commitment to the performance of American music. Schick’s publications include a book, The Percussionist’s Art: Same Bed, Different Dreams; and numerous recordings including the 2010 Percussion Works of Iannis Xenakis and its companion The Complete Early Percussion Works of Karlheinz Stockhausen in 2014 (Mode). The latter received Germany’s award for the best new music release of 2015.
Steven Schick is distinguished professor of music and the inaugural holder of the Reed Family Presidential Chair at the University of California, San Diego.
Pianist Cory Smythe has worked closely with pioneering artists in new, improvisatory, and classical music, including multi-instrumentalist-composer Tyshawn Sorey, violinist Hilary Hahn, and transdisciplinary composers from Anthony Braxton to Zosha Di Castri. His own “perplexingly perfect” (The Wire) music “dissolves the lines between composition and improvisation with rigor” (Chicago Reader). Smythe has been featured at the Newport Jazz, Wien Modern, and Darmstadt festivals, as well as at Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart festival, where he premiered new work created in collaboration with composer-improvisors Peter Evans and Craig Taborn. He has received commissions from Present Music, the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Trondheim Jazz Orchestra, the Wiener Festwochen, and the International Contemporary Ensemble, of which he is a longtime member. Smythe’s recent critically acclaimed albums on the Pyroclastic label have been made with the support of The Shifting Foundation. He has received a Grammy award for his work with Ms. Hahn and a 2022 Herb Alpert Award in music.
Aotearoa New Zealand-born American composer Annea Lockwood (b. 1939) brings vibrant energy, ceaseless curiosity, and a profound sense of openness to her music. Lockwood’s lifelong fascination with the visceral effects of sound in our environments and through our bodies—the way sounds unfold and their myriad “life spans”—serves as the focal point for works ranging from concert music to performance art to multimedia installations.
In recent years Lockwood and her music have received widespread attention, including a Columbia University Miller Theatre Composer Portrait concert, a feature article in The New York Times, a SEAMUS Lifetime Achievement Award, a documentary film by director Sam Green, and most recently, election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her recent collaborative works Into the Vanishing Point with the ensemble Yarn/Wire and Becoming Air with avant-garde trumpeter Nate Wooley were released on Black Truffle Records to great acclaim. Her work has been presented internationally at institutions and festivals such as Lucerne Festival, Tectonics Athens Festival, Signale Graz, Counterflows International Festival of Music and Art, Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, and many others.
Lockwood has received commissions from numerous ensembles and solo performers, including Bang On A Can, baritone Thomas Buckner, pianists Sarah Cahill, Lois Svard, and Jennifer Hymer, the Holon Scratch Orchestra, Essential Music, Yarn/Wire, and Issue Project Room.
Her music is recorded on the Lovely, XI, Mutable, Pogus, EM Records (Japan), Rattle Records, Recital, Harmonia Mundi, CRI, Superior Viaduct, Black Truffle, New World, Gruenrekorder, and Moving Furniture Records. Hearing Studies, co-authored with Ruth Anderson, was published by Open Space in 2021.
Leilehua Lanzilotti (b. 1983) is a Kanaka Maoli composer, multimedia artist, curator, scholar, and educator. Lanzilotti’s practice explores radical indigenous contemporaneity, integrating community engagement into the heart of projects. By world-building through multimedia installation works and nontraditional concert experiences/musical interventions, Lanzilotti’s works activate imagination around new paths forward in language sovereignty, water sovereignty, land stewardship, and respect. Uplifting others by crafting projects that support both local communities and economy, the work inspires hope to continue.
Lanzilotti was honored to be a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Music for with eyes the color of time (string orchestra), which the Pulitzer committee called, “a vibrant composition . . . that distinctly combines experimental string textures and episodes of melting lyricism.”
Recently a Native Arts & Cultures Foundation’s SHIFT – Transformative Change and Indigenous Arts awardee, Lanzilotti has received additional distinguished fellowships & residencies through The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center, Casa Wabi, Bogliasco Foundation, the Merwin Conservancy, the McKnight Visiting Composer Residency Program, and the MacGeorge Fellowship at the University of Melbourne.
As a composer, Lanzilotti’s works are characterized by expansive explorations of timbre. These works have been premiered at international festivals such as Ars Electronica (Austria), Thailand International Composition Festival, and Dots+Loops—Australia’s post-genre music and arts series. Lanzilotti has written new works for ensembles such as Roomful of Teeth, ETHEL (with guest Allison Logins-Hull), and Sō Percussion. Additionally, Lanzilotti is part of the network of musicians / artists in the Wandelweiser collective.
Lanzilotti’s new multimedia work, the sky in our hands, our hands in the sky, is currently on tour through 2026, having premiered at The Noguchi Museum in Spring 2024. The tour continues to the Cranbrook Art Museum (October 9, 2024–January 12, 2025), the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (March 2–May 18, 2025), the Chazen Museum of Art, University of Wisconsin-Madison (September 8–December 23, 2025), and the Honolulu Museum of Art (February 13–July 26, 2026).
As a recording artist, Lanzilotti has played on albums from Björk’s Vulnicura Live and Joan Osborne’s Love and Hate, to David Lang’s anatomy theater. Lanzilotti has premiered many new works including Wayfinder—a viola concerto by Dai Fujikura inspired by Polynesian wayfinding. in manus tuas—Lanzilotti’s solo viola album debut—was featured in Steve Smith’s Log Journal Playlist (Live life out Loud), Bandcamp’s Best Contemporary Classical Albums of 2019, and The Boston Globe’s Top 10 classical albums of 2019, and was called “an entrancing new album” by The New Yorker’s Alex Ross.
As a performer, projects include: performing Dai Fujikura’s Wayfinder Concerto as a soloist with the Nagoya Philharmonic, a project that uplifts native knowledge and indigenous intuition while encouraging courageous and active listening; performing with object instruments created by Adam Morford (metal), Toshiko Takaezu (ceramic), and others; and improvising as a member of The Yes &. Lanzilotti’s curatorial work extends from museum collaborations such as the currently touring Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within, to institutional commissioning at EMPAC as the Curator of Music.
As an educator, Lanzilotti has been on the faculty at New York University, University of Northern Colorado (Director and founder of the experimental UNCOmmon Ensemble and Asst. Professor of Viola), and University of Hawaiʻi—Mānoa in both composition and viola. Additionally, Lanzilotti createdShaken Not Stuttered, a free online resource demonstrating extended techniques for strings.
Written publications include contributions to a new monograph honoring the life and work of Toshiko Takaezu published by Yale University Press, and to Tuning Calder’s Clouds, edited by Vic Brooks and Jennifer Burris (Calder Foundation and Athénée Press)—the first book to explore the artistic, technological, and political intersections of Alexander Calder’s sculptural Acoustic Ceiling. Other contributions to books include featured works: the work beyond the accident of time (2019)—honoring Noguchi’s never-fully-realized Bell Tower for Hiroshima(1951)—is included in Walking From Scores, a bilingual anthology of text and graphic scores to be used while walking, from Fluxus to the critical works of current artists, through the tradition of experimental music and performance. “Lanzilotti’s score brings us together across the world in remembrance, through the commitment of shared sonic gestures.” (Cities & Health)
Dr. Lanzilotti is a graduate of Oberlin Conservatory of Music, Yale School of Music, and Manhattan School of Music. In addition, Lanzilotti was an orchestral fellow in the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin and New World Symphony, participated in the Lucerne Festival Academy under Pierre Boulez, and was the original violist in the Lucerne Festival Alumni Ensemble. Mentors include Hiroko Primrose, Peter Slowik, Jesse Levine, Martin Bresnick, Wilfried Strehle, Karen Ritscher, and Reiko Füting.
Tania León (b. Havana, Cuba) is highly regarded as a composer, conductor, educator, and advisor to arts organizations. Her orchestral work Stride, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, was awarded the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Music. In 2022, she was named a recipient of the 45th Annual Kennedy Center Honors for lifetime artistic achievements. In 2023, she was awarded the Michael Ludwig Nemmers Prize in Music Composition from Northwestern University. Most recently, León became the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s next Composer-in-Residence—a post she will hold for two seasons, beginning in September 2023. She will also hold Carnegie Hall’s Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair for its 2023-2024 season.
Recent premieres include works for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Arkansas Symphony Orchestra, Detroit Symphony, NDR Symphony Orchestra, Grossman Ensemble, International Contemporary Ensemble, Modern Ensemble, Jennifer Koh’s project Alone Together, and The Curtis Institute. Appearances as guest conductor include Orchestre Philharmonique de Marseille, Gewandhausorchester, Orquesta Sinfónica de Guanajuato, and Orquesta Sinfónica de Cuba, among others. Upcoming commissions feature a work for the League of American Orchestras, and a work for Claire Chase, flute, and The Crossing Choir with text by Rita Dove.
A founding member and first Music Director of the Dance Theatre of Harlem, León instituted the Brooklyn Philharmonic Community Concert Series, co-founded the American Composers Orchestra’s Sonidos de las Américas Festivals, was New Music Advisor to the New York Philharmonic, and is the founder/Artistic Director of Composers Now, a presenting, commissioning and advocacy organization for living composers. Honors include the New York Governor’s Lifetime Achievement, inductions into the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and fellowship awards from ASCAP Victor Herbert Award and The Koussevitzky Music and Guggenheim Foundations, among others. She also received a proclamation for Composers Now by New York City Mayor, and theMadWoman Festival Award in Music (Spain).
León has received Honorary Doctorate Degrees from Colgate University, Oberlin, SUNY Purchase College, and The Curtis Institute of Music, and served as U.S. Artistic Ambassador of American Culture in Madrid, Spain. A CUNY Professor Emerita, she was awarded a 2018 United States Artists Fellowship, Chamber Music America’s 2022 National Service Award, and Harvard University’s 2022 Luise Vosgerchian Teaching Award. In 2023, Columbia University’s Rare Book & Manuscript Library acquired Tania’s León’s archive.
