Lisa Bielawa

Composer, producer, and vocalist Lisa Bielawa (b. 1968) takes inspiration from literary sources and close artistic collaborations. Her music has been described as “ruminative, pointillistic and harmonically slightly tart,” by The New York Times, and “fluid and arresting … at once dramatic and probing,” by the San Francisco Chronicle.

It has been premiered and commissioned by the NY PHIL BIENNIAL, Carnegie Hall, Kennedy Center, National Cathedral, MAXXI Museum, Helsinki Music Center, Radio France, Yerevan Concert Hall, Venice Biennale of Architecture, Serbia’s INFANT Festival, and more.  Her honors include the Rome Prize in Musical Composition, Music Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, a Los Angeles Area Emmy nomination, and more.

Bielawa has created music for public spaces in Lower Manhattan, the banks of the Tiber River in Rome, the sites of former airfields in Berlin and San Francisco, and to mark the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. During the coronavirus lockdown, her work Broadcast from Home, which has been inducted into the Library of Congress, used submitted testimonies and recorded voices from six continents. Born in San Francisco, Bielawa moved to New York after receiving her B.A. in Literature in 1990 from Yale University.