Composer Paola Prestini has cultivated a uniquely expansive and humanistic musical voice, through pieces that transcend genre and discipline, and projects whose global impact reverberates beyond the walls of the concert hall. Far more than just notes on a page, Prestini's works give voice to those whom society has silenced, and offer a platform for the causes that are most vital to us all. Prestini has been named one of the Top 35 Female Composers in Classical Music by the Washington Post, one of the top 100 Composers in the World by National Public Radio, and one of the Top 30 Professionals of the Year by Musical America. As Co-Founder of National Sawdust, she has collaborated with luminaries like poet Robin Coste Lewis, visual artists Julie Mehretu and Nick Cave, and musical legends David Byrne, Philip Glass and Renée Fleming, and her works have been performed throughout the world with leading institutions like the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Opera, Dallas Opera, London's Barbican Center, Mexico's Bellas Artes, and many more.
Composer Paola Prestini has cultivated a uniquely expansive and humanistic musical voice, through pieces that transcend genre and discipline, and projects whose global impact reverberates beyond the walls of the concert hall. Far more than just notes on a page, Prestini's works give voice to those whom society has silenced, and offer a platform for the causes that are most vital to us all. Prestini has been named one of the Top 35 Female Composers in Classical Music by the Washington Post, one of the top 100 Composers in the World by National Public Radio, and one of the Top 30 Professionals of the Year by Musical America. As Co-Founder of National Sawdust, she has collaborated with luminaries like poet Robin Coste Lewis, visual artists Julie Mehretu and Nick Cave, and musical legends David Byrne, Philip Glass and Renée Fleming, and her works have been performed throughout the world with leading institutions like the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Opera, Dallas Opera, London's Barbican Center, Mexico's Bellas Artes, and many more.
Prestini's 2024-25 season features a staggering five world premieres of major opera and music-theater works across the United States. In September 2024, her chamber opera Silent Light will open the 10th Anniversary Season of National Sawdust, the groundbreaking new music venue which Prestini Co-Founded, and which is one of the few major New York cultural institutions led by women. With a libretto by Royce Vavrek and direction by Thaddeus Strassberger, the piece delves into the complex moral dilemmas faced by members of a Mennonite community as they grapple with forbidden love and the limitations of restrictive society, and performances will feature conductor Christopher Rountree leading Trinity Choir and NOVUS ensemble, with singers Anthony Dean Griffey, Daniel Okulitch, and Brittany Renee. In early 2025, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and VisionIntoArt will co-present the world premiere of Primero Sueño, a site-specific processional opera taking place at The Met Cloisters that explores the life of proto-feminist Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Co-composed with Magos Herrera, who will also star as Sor Juana de la Cruz, the production will feature the German vocal ensemble Sjaella, with stage direction by Louisa Proske. Prestini's expansive, multi-modal opera Sensorium Ex will have its world premiere May 22-25 presented by the Common Senses Festival in Omaha, Nebraska, in a co-presentation by VisionIntoArt and Beth Morrison Projects. With a libretto by poet Brenda Shaughnessy, the dystopian tale centers on a scientist/mother and her non-verbal child, operating at the intersection of AI and disability, while exploring fundamental questions of what it means to have voice. Sensorium Ex is pioneering a new set of Artificial Intelligence tools as a way of expanding the possibilities for voice and expression, developed in collaboration with the The NYU Ability Project that allows people with disordered, impaired, or limited speech to communicate, with an emphasis on expressivity and personalization. The spring and summer of 2025 will see two more world premieres: an immersive choral theater work entitled Port(al) commissioned by Brooklyn Youth Chorus (BYC) in collaboration with Radiolab founder and host Jad Abumrad, as well as multidisciplinary collaborator and director Jessica Grindstaff, which will take place at the Brooklyn Navy Yard’s Agger Fish Building, and the outdoor chamber opera The Fourth Crow, which features Julian Crouch and Sandbox Percussion and will be presented by Pike Opera in Milford, PA. Upcoming commissions include a new opera for the 50th anniversary of the Spoleto Festival USA with Robin Coste Lewis and Ava DuVernay.
Prestini's compositions have been praised by The New York Times as “otherworldly…outright gorgeous" and "music of candid vulnerability," while NPR stated that her work "bursts open in beauty." The Financial Times proclaimed that “New York retains a remarkable cadre of composers, but chief among these is the singular figure of Paola Prestini,” The Wall Street Journal noted “Ms. Prestini is known for pushing the boundaries of classical music through collaborations with poets, filmmakers and conservationists, among others,” and VAN Magazine stated how "like a public square, each Prestini piece is a meeting place across aesthetic, intellectual, and cultural lines." 21CM Magazine simply posed the rhetorical question: “is there any one person who’s doing more to reshape contemporary classical music in America than Paola Prestini?”
Prestini's large-scale multimedia compositions have fundamentally changed the landscape of her art form, from the world's first and largest communal Virtual Reality opera The Hubble Cantata, to the historic performance of her collaborative pandemic project Con Alma, which took place at the United Nations as a statement on the solidarity and resilience of women in the digital age. Her boundary-breaking work Sensorium Ex is the first opera starring a nonverbal lead, and its casting and creative development process, as well as its purpose-built AI technology, are offering a new blueprint for how the performing arts can approach disability and inclusivity.
A tireless advocate for equity across her industry, Prestini has repeatedly shattered the glass ceiling by conceiving and creating programs such as the Hildegard Commission for emerging women and gender marginalized composers, and the Blueprint Fellowship for emerging composers and women mentors at the Juilliard School. She was also the first woman in the Minnesota Opera’s New Works Initiative with her grand opera Edward Tulane, and was among the 19 leading women composers to participate in the New York Philharmonic's Project 19 — the largest women-only commissioning initiative in history that commemorated American women gaining the right to vote with the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920.
Prestini has been awarded substantial support from the Mellon and Ford Foundations, named as a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow and a Sundance Institute Film Music Program Fellow, and has been composer-in-residence at the Park Avenue Armory, MASS MoCA, and the American Academy of Rome. Prestini is also the co-founder of VisionIntoArt, a non-profit new music and interdisciplinary arts production company in New York City that incubates deep process interdisciplinary and impact works. She attended the Peabody School of Music and is a graduate of the Juilliard School, and she resides in Brooklyn with her husband, the acclaimed cellist Jeffrey Zeigler, and her son, the yo-yo/rubix master, Tommaso.
