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Angélica Negrón is a Puerto Rican composer and performer who writes music for voices, orchestras, ensembles and film as well as robots, toys, and plants. At the intersection of classical and electronic music, she blends unusual instruments, and acoustic, electronic and found sounds “to underscore the inventive sound world that she brings to her music...” (San Francisco Chronicle).

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Rooted in her experience as a Puerto Rican artist living in the diaspora, her work explores migration, absence, and belonging, evident in upcoming premieres including a cello concerto commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, performed by Yo-Yo Ma and conducted by Gustavo Dudamel, and The Puerto Rico Experiment, a song cycle for Roomful of Teeth and Balún commissioned by PAC NYC that examines Puerto Rico’s history as a site of political, scientific, and economic experimentation.

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Angélica has composed for Opera Philadelphia (a drag opera film with Mathew Placek and Sasha Velour), Dallas Symphony Orchestra, Seattle Symphony, Danish National Symphony Orchestra, Kronos Quartet, Brooklyn Rider, and for Sō Percussion who commissioned and performed her Carnegie Hall debut. A recent work for Trés Chamber Music Trio and saxophonist José Antonio Zayas Cabán, honors stories of the Puerto Rican diaspora in the Twin Cities.

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As guest curator for the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s 2025 Green Umbrella series, (Creative Director, John Adams), Angélica collaborated with Lido Pimienta, Darian Donovan Thomas, and Raquel Acevedo Klein on a program featuring Caribbean and Latin American composers. A 2026 Lincoln Center Collider Fellow, she developed multidisciplinary work with botanical artist Sophie Parker and filmmaker Claudia Calderón.

The first composer-in-residence at the New York Botanical Garden, Angélica composed an outdoor immersive electronic and choral soundscape, and as the recipient of the Hermitage Greenfield Prize, a site-specific work synchronized to the sunset for EnsembleNewSRQ, as the recipient of the Hermitage Greenfield Prize. While artist-in-residence at WNYC’s The Greene Space, she created El Living Room, a multimedia television talk show.

Original scores include the HBO docuseries Menudo: Forever Young, the Netflix documentary Karol G: Tomorrow Was Beautiful, and for Sesame Workshop’s Through Our Eyes. Her arrangements can be heard on Rosalía’s acclaimed 2025 album LUX (Columbia Records).

Angélica’s musical education began at El Conservatorio de Música de Puerto Rico under Alfonso Fuentes—while making waves in San Juan’s local DIY music scene—and later studied at NYU under Pedro da Silva and The Graduate Center (CUNY) under Tania León. An educator herself, Angélica was a teaching artist (NY Philharmonic’s Very Young Composers program, Lincoln Center Education), guiding young artists in creative composition projects.

Angélica performs a solo show and is a founding member of tropical electronic band Balún, whose work appears in WNYC’s podcast La Brega. She currently lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she looks for ways to incorporate her love of drag, comedy, and the natural world into her work.

Recipient of the Musical America Award for Best Artist of the Year and Agent of Change and a Kennedy Center Next50 Honoree, Beth Morrison is hailed as a “contemporary opera mastermind” (LA Times) and “a powerhouse leading the industry to new heights” (WQXR). Beth Morrison is an opera and theatre producer, President and Creative Producer of Beth Morrison Projects, and Founding co-Director of the PROTOTYPE Festival.

Beth created Beth Morrison Projects (BMP) in 2006 to identify, support the work of emerging, established living composers, and to create a new kind of opera (“Beth Morrison is her own genre” - Opera News). BMP is celebrated as having been an industry disruptor and is now a tastemaker at the forefront of musical and theatrical innovation by commissioning, developing, producing and touring the groundbreaking new works of a diverse group of living composers and their collaborators, which take the form of opera-theatre, music-theatre, and vocal-theatre.

BMP encourages risk-taking and the result is provocative works that represent a dynamic and lasting legacy for a new American canon. Opera News has noted: “More than any other figure in the opera industry, Beth Morrison has helped propel the art form into the twenty-first century." In 2013, Beth co-founded the PROTOTYPE Festival with HERE, which has become “essential to the evolution of American opera” (New Yorker). Beth served a founding tenure as Producer for the Yale Institute for Music Theatre, as well as Producer for New York City Opera's VOX: Contemporary American Opera Lab. She first honed her management skills as the Administrative Director for the Boston University Tanglewood Institute.

She is currently an advisory board member of National Sawdust and Brooklyn Youth Chorus, as well as a board member of Opera America, the international competition, Music Theatre Now and Voices 21C, a social justice choir. Morrison is frequently asked to give lectures at conservatories across the country, including Yale, Mannes School of Music, NYU, Manhattan School of Music, Arizona State University, University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana and more. Morrison is also in demand as a speaker both nationally and internationally and has delivered key note speeches for Classical:Next and Opera Europa among others. Morrison holds a Bachelor of Music from Boston University, a Master of Music from Arizona State University, and an MFA from Yale School of Drama.

DU YUN, born and raised in Shanghai, China, and currently based in New York City, works at the intersection of opera, orchestral, theatre, cabaret, musical, oral tradition, public performances, electronics, visual arts, and noise. Her body of work is championed by some of today’s finest performing groups and organizations around the world. Known for her “relentless originality and unflinching social conscience” (The New Yorker), Du Yun’s second opera, Angel’s Bone (libretto by Royce Vavrek), won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Music. She was nominated for a Grammy Award in the Best Classical Composition category for her work Air Glow. Her collaborative opera Sweet Land with Raven Chacon (for opera company The Industry) was the 2021 Best New Opera by the North America Critics Association. Four of her feature studio albums were named The New Yorker’s Notable Recordings of the Year, in 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021, respectively. Her latest monodrama operaIn Our Daughter’s Eyes was a notable performance of the year in 2022 by the New Yorker. A community champion, Du Yun was a founding member of the International Contemporary Ensemble; served as the Artistic Director of MATA Festival (2014-2018); conceived the Pan Asia Sounding Festival (National Sawdust); and founded Future Tradition, a global initiative that illuminates the provenance lineages of folk art and uses these structures to build cross-regional collaborations from the ground up. Du Yun was named one of 38 Great Immigrants by the Carnegie Foundation (2018), “Artist of the Year” by the Beijing Music Festival (2019). In 2022, she was granted a Creative Capital Award for an AR inter-generational Kun-opera project. Asia Society Hong Kong has honored her for her continued contribution in the performing arts field. Other notable awards include Guggenheim, American Academy Berlin Prize, Fromm Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts. The Carnegie Foundation and the Vilcek Prize in Music have honored her as an immigrant who have made lasting contributions to the American society. In 2023 Harvard University honored her as centennial medalist, the highest recognition for its alumni. In 2024 Du Yun is inducted to American Academy of Arts & Sciences. As an avid performer and bandleader (Ok Miss), her onstage persona has been described by theNew York Times as “an indie pop diva with an avant-garde edge.” Du Yun is Professor of Composition at the Peabody Institute, and Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. Her concert music is published worldwide by G.Schirmer

Ellen Reid is one of the most innovative artists of her generation. An American composer and sound artist whose breadth of work spans opera, sound design, film scoring, avant-pop, ensemble and choral writing. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Music for her opera, p r i s m, in 2019. Reid's orchestral work has been performed by the New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, among many others.

Reid created Ellen Reid SOUNDWALK, a GPS-enabled work of public art that reimagines urban parks as interactive soundscapes. SOUNDWALK premiered in New York's Central Park, and continues to expand to urban parkland around the world, including Los Angeles' Griffith Park, London's Regent's Park & Primrose Hill, and Tokyo's Ueno Park. An album of music written for the project, Big Majestic, was released on New Amsterdam / Eclipse Projects. Its featured performers include the Kronos Quartet, Shabaka Hutchings, James McVinnie, and Lisel.

Reid is known for her dynamic, lyrical film scores, and she has worked with A24, Amazon Studios, and the Duplass Brothers Productions. Her work has been featured at film festivals including SXSW, IFC Fest, TriBeCa Film Festival and the Toronto Film Festival. Her concert work was also an inspiration for artist Alex Prager’s short film RUN.

In 2016, Reid co-founded Luna Composition Lab with composer Missy Mazzoli. The organization provides mentorship, education, and resources for young female, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming composers ages 13-18, and is the only initiative of its kind in the United States.

In addition to the Pulitzer Prize for Music, Ellen Reid’s p r i s m was the winner of the Music Critics Association of North America award for Best New Opera in 2019. Reid is a recipient of Lincoln Center's Emerging Artist Award, she has been one of Musical America’s 30 Professionals of the Year, and she is a Sundance Institute Interdisciplinary Program Grantee.

Born in Oak Ridge Tennessee in 1983, Ellen Reid received her BFA from Columbia University and her MA from California Institute of the Arts. Ellen Reid has served as the Contemporary Music Chair of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and she was the first composer to be in residence with both Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw Concert Hall and Concertgebouw Orchestra simultaneously. Ellen Reid’s music is exclusively published by Chester Music, part of the Wise Music Group. She continues to live and work in New York City and Los Angeles.

Emma O’Halloran is a GRAMMY-nominated Irish composer whose music is driven by a fascination with joy, wonder, hope, and human connection. Freely intertwining acoustic and electronic music, her work seeks to capture moments of intimacy and magic, and has been described as “intensely beautiful” (Washington Post) and “unencumbered, authentic, and joyful” (I Care If You Listen).

Emma’s work spans collaborations with folk musicians, chamber ensembles, turntables, laptop orchestra, symphony orchestra, opera, and theatre. Known for her distinctive fusion of pop, rock, and electronic influences with the rich colours and textures of acoustic instruments, her work has found a wide audience and has been featured at various music festivals such as Classical NEXT, Cork International Choral Festival, PODIUM Esslingen, New Music Dublin, Tokyo’s Born Creative Festival, and Bang on a Can LOUD Weekend. Additionally, her music has been performed by Crash Ensemble, Chamber Choir Ireland, ensemble reflector, Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra, PRISM Saxophone Quartet, and the Irish National Symphony Orchestra, amongst others.

In recent years, Emma’s passion for storytelling has led her towards multidisciplinary projects such as soundwalks and opera. She has written for Irish National Opera, Boston Lyric Opera, and Beth Morrison Projects, and her recent operas TRADE and Mary Motorhead received critical acclaim at LA Opera and New York’s PROTOTYPE Festival, with the Los Angeles Times describing her as “a kind of modern-day Monteverdi.” Released on Signum Records in 2025, the album of these operas earned Emma a GRAMMY nomination for Best Opera Recording at the 68th GRAMMY Awards.

Emma loves working with people of all ages to explore and create music, and she has served as a mentor for various composition programmes in Ireland and the United States. In 2021, in partnership with the Irish National Concert Hall, she founded the Creative Lab, an award-winning mentorship programme for young composers from traditionally underrepresented groups in music composition. Emma holds a PhD in Music Composition from Princeton University.

Gabriela Lena Frank is an American pianist and composer of contemporary classical music.

Frank’s father is an American of Lithuanian Jewish heritage and her mother is Peruvian of Chinese descent. She grew up in Berkeley, California. Her parents met when her father was a Peace Corps volunteer in Peru in the 1960s.

Frank received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Rice University. She earned a Doctorate in Music Composition from the University of Michigan in 2001. She has studied composition with Paul Cooper, William Albright, Leslie Bassett, William Bolcom, Michael Daugherty, and Samuel Jones.

Frank’s work often draws on her multicultural background, especially her mother’s Peruvian heritage. In many of her compositions, she elicits the sounds of Latin American instruments such as Peruvian pan flute or charango guitar, although the works are typically scored for Western classical instruments and ensembles such as the symphony orchestra or string quartet. She has said, “I think the music can be seen as a by-product of my always trying to figure out how Latina I am and how gringa I am.”

Frank is a member of the Silk Road Ensemble under the direction of cellist Yo Yo Ma. Her composition Ritmos Anchinos appears on the Silk Road Ensemble’s album Off the Map (World Village & In a Circle Records, 2009).

In 2017, Frank founded her own school, the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music, for emerging composers to work with renowned performers. In 2020, she received the 25th Annual Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities for her work “weaving Latin American influences into classical constructs and breaking gender, disability and cultural barriers in classical music composition.”

“Radiant and transcendent”, the music of Juhi Bansal weaves together themes celebrating musical and cultural diversity, nature and the environment, and strong female role models. Her music draws upon elements as disparate as Hindustani music, the spectralists, progressive metal, musical theatre and choral traditions to create deeply expressive, evocative sound-worlds. As an Indian composer brought up in Hong Kong, her work draws subtly upon both those traditions, entwining them closely and intricately with the gestures of western classical music.

Recent projects include Love, Loss and Exile, a song cycle on poetry by Afghan women commissioned by Songfest; Songs from the deep, a new orchestral work inspired by humpback whale songs commissioned by the Oregon Mozart Players; and Waves of Change, a digital operatic short on womanhood, identity and clash of cultures inspired by the story of the Bangladesh Girls Surf Club. Working across orchestra, choral music, opera, chamber music, art song and electronics, recent seasons have included commissions from the Tonhalle Düsseldorf, Virginia Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic Association, Beth Morrison Projects, Choral Arts initiative, New York Virtuoso Singers and more. Her music has been featured on several Grammy nominated albums, and is regularly performed throughout the U.S. Europe and Asia.

A conductor as well as composer, she has been awarded fellowships by the Douglas Moore Fund for American Opera, the Atlantic Music Center, Seasons Music Festival, Oregon Bach Festival Composer’s Symposium, and the Pacific Music Festival. She frequently premieres the work of other composers and accompanies singers at the piano.

MARY KOUYOUMDJIAN is a GRAMMY®-nominated composer and documentarian with projects ranging from concert works to multimedia collaborations and film scores. A finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Music and a first-generation Armenian-American, she draws on a sonic palette rooted in her heritage, including family directly affected by the Lebanese Civil War and the Armenian Genocide. Combining her interest in music as documentary with a background in experimental composition, she progressively blends the old with the new. A strong believer in freedom of speech and in the arts as an amplifier of expression, she often integrates recorded testimonies of resilient individuals with field recordings of place, inviting empathy by humanizing complex experiences of social and political conflict.

Kouyoumdjian’s 2026-2027 season includes the release of the world premiere recording of her evening-length sonic-documentary album Paper Pianos, a Pulitzer Prize-finalist in Music, directed and written by Nigel Maister and performed by the GRAMMY® Award-winning ensemble Alarm Will Sound, out on Cantaloupe Music. The season also features the world premieres of two new orchestral works, including Keep Your Eyes Open, featuring Stephanie Childress as conductor and narrator in collaboration with cultural historian and author Colin Dickey, co-commissioned by the Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra, Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, and Naples Philharmonic; as well as In Their Tongue, a work co-commissioned by the Fresno Philharmonic, California Symphony, Knoxville Symphony, and Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra as part of New Music USA's Amplifying Voices program. Kouyoumdjian is currently working on a new viola piece for Hank Dutt, a former violist of the Kronos Quartet, as well as several large-scale works.

Kouyoumdjian has received commissions for such organizations as the New York Philharmonic, Kronos Quartet, Carnegie Hall, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Beth Morrison Projects/OPERA America, Alarm Will Sound, Bang on a Can, International Contemporary Ensemble, Brooklyn Youth Chorus, the Houston Symphony, American Composers Forum, Roomful of Teeth, WQXR, REDSHIFT, Experiments in Opera, Helen Simoneau Danse, the Nouveau Classical Project, Music of Remembrance, Friction Quartet, Ensemble Oktoplus, and the Los Angeles New Music Ensemble among others. Her work has been performed internationally at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MASS MoCA, the Barbican Centre, Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Millennium Park, Benaroya Hall, Prototype Festival, the New York Philharmonic Biennial, Cabrillo Festival, SF Jazz, Big Ears Festival, 21C Music Festival, and Cal Performances.

Her opera Adoration, adapted from Atom Egoyan’s 2008 film, was commissioned, developed, produced, and premiered by Beth Morrison Projects in New York City before receiving its West Coast premiere at LA Opera to rave reviews. The world premiere recording was released on Bright Shiny Things in August 2025 and was nominated for a GRAMMY® Award for Best Opera Recording, making history as the first opera by an Armenian composer in the category. Kouyoumdjian’s debut portrait album, WITNESS with the Kronos Quartet, was released through Phenotypic Recordings in 2025 and was called “powerful, poignant” by Gramophone and “gorgeous, brutal, and awe-stricken” by FLOOD Magazine. In May 2025, her Pulitzer-nominated music-documentary, Paper Pianos, commissioned by Alarm Will Sound, was performed at The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center following its 2023 premiere at EMPAC.

Kouyoumdjian’s residencies include Buffalo String Works, Alarm Will Sound/The Mizzou International Composers Festival, Roulette/The Jerome Foundation, Montalvo Arts Center, EMPAC, and Exploring the Metropolis. Her music has been described as “eloquently scripted" and "emotionally wracking” by The New York Times and as "politically fearless" and "the most harrowing moments on stage at any New York performance" by New York Music Daily. In her work as a composer, orchestrator, and music editor for film, she has collaborated on a diverse array of motion pictures, including writing the original score for the documentary An Act of Worship (Capital K Pictures and PBS’s POV Docs) and orchestrating the soundtrack to The Place Beyond the Pines (Focus Features). 

Kouyoumdjian holds a D.M.A. and M.A. in composition from Columbia University, where she studied primarily with Zosha Di Castri, Georg Friedrich Haas, Fred Lerdahl, and George Lewis; an M.A. in Scoring for Film & Multimedia from New York University; and a B.A. in Music Composition from the University of California, San Diego, where she studied with Chaya Czernowin, Steven Kazuo Takasugi, Anthony Davis, Steven Schick, and Chinary Ung.

Dedicated to new music advocacy, Kouyoumdjian is a Co-Founder of the annual new music conference New Music Gathering, served as the founding Executive Director of contemporary music ensemble Hotel Elefant, and served as Co-Artistic Director of Alaska's new music festival Wild Shore New Music.

As an avid educator, Kouyoumdjian is the Associate Professor of Composition for Collaborative Media at Mannes School of Music at The New School; she has previously been on faculty at Columbia University, the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University, Boston Conservatory at Berklee, Brooklyn College's Feirstein School of Cinema, Mannes Prep, and the New York Philharmonic's Very Young Composers program. Kouyoumdjian is proud to have her music published by Schott's PSNY and is based in Brooklyn, NY

Her music has been performed allover the world by the Kronos Quartet, eighth blackbird, the Minnesota Orchestra, the South Carolina Philharmonic, NOW Ensemble and many others. Upcoming projects include new recordings by eighth blackbird, Kronos Quartet and her own ensemble Victoire, the world premiere of her chamber opera, Song from the Uproar: The Lives and Deaths of Isabelle Eberhardt, at The Kitchen in New York in 2012, and the premiere of a new orchestral work by the League of Composers Chamber Orchestra. Recent performances include a workshop staging of Song from the Uproar at Bard College Conservatory, and a performance by the American Composers Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, She is the recipient of four ASCAP Young Composer Awards, a Fulbright Grant, and grants from the Jerome Foundation and the Barlow Endowment. In 2006 Missy taught composition at Yale University, and is now Executive Director of the MATA Festival in New York City. Missy is also an active pianist, and often performs with Victoire, an "all-star, all-female quintet" (Time Out NewYork) that she founded in 2008 dedicated exclusively to her own compositions. Victoire will release its debut CD on New Amsterdam Records in September, 2010.

Molly Joyce’s music has been described as “serene power” (New York Times), written to “superb effect” (The Wire), and “impassioned” (The Washington Post). Her work is primarily concerned with disability as a creative source. She has an impaired left hand from a previous car accident, and the primary vehicle in her pursuit is her electric vintage toy organ, an instrument she bought on eBay which suits her body and engages her disability on a compositional and performative level.

Molly’s creative projects have been presented at TEDxMidAtlantic, Bang on a Can Marathon, Danspace Project, Gaudeamus Muziekweek, National Gallery of Art, Classical:NEXT, VisionIntoArt’s FERUS Festival, and featured in outlets such as Pitchfork, Red Bull Radio, WNYC’s New Sounds, and I Care If You Listen. Additionally, she has written for publications 21CM, Disability Arts Online, and collaborated across disciplines including with visual artists Lex Brown and Julianne Swartz, choreographers Melissa Barak and Jerron Herman, director Austin Regan, and writers Marco Grosse and Christopher Oscar Peña.

Molly is a graduate of The Juilliard School, Royal Conservatory in The Hague, Yale School of Music, alumnus of the National YoungArts Foundation, and currently serves on the composition faculty at New York University Steinhardt.

PAOLA PRESTINI is “the enterprising composer and impresario” (New York Times) whose interdisciplinary vision is helping to shape the future of new music. Named one of the “Top 100 Composers in the World under 40” (NPR), her music has been commissioned by and been performed at Carnegie Hall, by the Chicago Symphony (Music Now), the New York Philharmonic (Biennale), New York City Opera, and the Kronos Quartet. Her compositions have been performed worldwide, from the Kennedy Center, BAM, and the Park Avenue Armory, to London’s Barbican Centre. Prestini serves as “visionary-inchief” (Time Out New York) of VisionIntoArt (VIA), the non-profit multimedia production company she co-founded as a student in 1999. Last fall Prestini presided over the launch of VIA Records, hailed as “an essential new voice in the future of American classical music” (Q2 Music). She is also the Creative and Executive Director of National Sawdust, a nonprofit Brooklyn-based space for arts incubation, performance, and recording, where VIA is in residence.

Composer Sarah Kirkland Snider writes music of direct expression and vivid narrative that has been hailed as “rapturous” (The New York Times), “groundbreaking” (The Boston Globe), and “ravishingly beautiful” (NPR). One of the “Top 35 Female Composers in Classical Music” (The Washington Post), Snider’s work has been commissioned and/or performed by the Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, National, and San Francisco Symphony Orchestras; New York Philharmonic; Birmingham Royal Ballet; Emerson String Quartet; Renée Fleming; Colin Currie; eighth blackbird; and Roomful of Teeth, among many others. Snider’s recent works include Forward Into Light, an orchestral commission for the New York Philharmonic; Drink the Wild Ayre, the final commission by the Emerson String Quartet; and Mass for the Endangered, performed by dozens of choirs the world over. Her four full-length LPs – The Blue Hour, Mass for the Endangered, Unremembered, and Penelope – have garnered acclaim from The New York Times, NPR, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Gramophone Magazine, BBC Music Magazine, Pitchfork, and many others. A founding Co-Artistic Director of New Amsterdam Records, Snider has an M.M.and Artist’s Diploma from the Yale School of Music, and a B.A. from Wesleyan University. Her music is published by G. Schirmer.