Lisa Bielawa, composer & vocalist

Feb 8

LINKS & ASSETS

icon+instagram icon+facebook icon+vimeo‍ ‍icon+spotify‍ ‍icon+applemusic

MANAGEMENT & PR

Christina Jensen, christina@jensenartists.com

Gina Meola, gina@jensenartists.com

646.536.7864

“one of the most brilliant and unforgettable new scores I’ve heard in years”

— San Francisco Chronicle

“a dynamic and innovative composer”

— The Boston Globe

Composer, producer, and vocalist Lisa Bielawa (b. 1968) is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow and a Rome Prize winner in Musical Composition. She takes inspiration for her work from literary sources and close artistic collaborations. Gramophone reports, “Bielawa is gaining gale force as a composer, churning out impeccably groomed works that at once evoke the layered precision of Vermeer and the conscious recklessness of Jackson Pollock.” 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.

Bielawa is the recipient of the Music Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, an OPERA America Grant for Female Composers, a 2025 commission from The Serge Koussevitzky Music Foundation in the Library of Congress, and is a 2025 New Music USA Amplifying Voices composer. She was named a William Randolph Hearst Visiting Artist Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society for 2018 and was Artist-in-Residence at Kaufman Music Center in New York for the 2020-2021 season. During the 2022-23 season, she was a member of the inaugural Louisville Orchestra’s Creators Corps.

Bielawa is established as one of today’s leading composers and performers, consistently incorporating community-making as part of her artistic vision. In an article which branded Bielawa a “fire starter,” New Music Box reported, “It’s difficult to stand anywhere near composer and vocalist Lisa Bielawa and not feel energized by proximity. . . An extrovert to the core, Bielawa acknowledges that her highly social nature has taken her in some specific directions both as a composer and as a musical citizen. Community building and close collaboration with performing artists is often central to her compositional process.” She has created music for public spaces in Lower Manhattan, a bridge over the Ohio River in Louisville, KY, the banks of the Tiber River in Rome, on the sites of former airfields in Berlin and San Francisco, and to mark the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall; she has composed and produced a twelve-episode, made-for-TV opera that features over 350 musicians and was filmed in locations across the country.

Lisa Bielawa’s music is frequently performed throughout the U.S. and abroad. Her work has recently been premiered at the NY PHIL BIENNIAL, Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, The Kennedy Center, SHIFT Festival, Town Hall Seattle, Naumburg Orchestral Concerts Summer Series in New York’s Central Park, National Sawdust, Le Poisson Rouge, Rouen Opera, Helsinki Music Center, Arsenal de Metz, Japan Society, and MAXXI Museum in Rome, among others. Orchestras that have championed her music include the Louisville Orchestra, The Knights, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, American Composers Orchestra, Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, and the Orlando Philharmonic; she has also written for the combined forces of The Knights, San Francisco Girls Chorus, and Brooklyn Youth Chorus. Premieres of her work have been commissioned and presented by leading ensembles and organizations including the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, Miller Theatre at Columbia University on a Composer Portrait concert, Big Ears, Miami String Quartet, Brooklyn Rider, Seattle Chamber Music Society, American Guild of Organists, American Pianists Association, California Music Center, Akademiska Sångföreningen (Helsinki), Paul Dresher Ensemble, SOLI Chamber Ensemble, the Washington and PRISM Saxophone Quartets, Ensemble Variances (commissioned by Radio France), and more.

The 2025-2026 concert season features the world premiere of Bielawa’s Violin Concerto No. 2: PULSE, written for violinist Tessa Lark and commissioned by the Louisville Orchestra and Boston Modern Orchestra Project, with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and Santa Fe Pro Musica. Bielawa conceived of the piece as a way to keep her finger on the pulse of American life during a period of seismic change and self-examination. PULSE is also inspired by Lark’s background in multiple musical traditions, from Old-time to jazz to the classical avant-garde.
Bielawa’s 2025-26 season also includes the world premiere of Knoxville Broadcast, the latest iteration of her Broadcast series of spatialized symphonies, in October 2025. Knoxville Broadcast brings hundreds of musicians of diverse ages and musical backgrounds to Knoxville’s historic World’s Fair Park in a performance that celebrates the vibrant musical culture and people of the region. Commissioned by the Big Ears Festival, the work draws inspiration from Knoxville’s rich history and from Bielawa’s time immersed in the community in the months leading up to the performance. Bielawa’s previous Broadcasts – large-scale, broadly inclusive works which she began creating in 2013 – have also included works for Tempelhof Airfield in Berlin; Crissy Field in San Francisco; marking the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall; Broadcast from Home, developed remotely during the early days of the pandemic lockdown in 2020; Louisville Broadcast for two historic sites in Louisville, Kentucky; and more. In 2021, Broadcast from Home was inducted into the Library of Congress as part of its Performing Arts COVID-19 Response Collection.
Actively composing for the stage as well, Bielawa is currently at work on her Guggenheim Fellowship project, a hybrid film and live action opera called La Ballonniste or Balloon (A Hot Air Opera) – a heartfelt comedy centering on 18th century French opera singer Élisabeth Tible, the first woman to fly in a hot air balloon. Previously, Bielawa received a 2018 Los Angeles Area Emmy nomination for her unprecedented, made-for-TV-and-online opera Vireo: The Spiritual Biography of a Witch's Accuser, created with librettist Erik Ehn and director Charles Otte. The groundbreaking opera was filmed in twelve parts at locations across the country – Alcatraz Island, a monastery on the Hudson River, a studio in Downtown LA, an abandoned train station in Oakland, and the California Redwoods – and features leading soloists and ensembles in support of its core cast, including soprano Deborah Voigt, Kronos Quartet, violinist Jennifer Koh, San Francisco Girls Chorus, cellist Joshua Roman, Alarm Will Sound, PRISM Saxophone Quartet, American Contemporary Music Ensemble (ACME), and many others. All twelve episodes were broadcast on KCETLink’s Emmy Award-winning arts and culture series Artbound, as well as on-demand online. The Los Angeles Times called Vireo an opera, “unlike any you have seen before, in content and in form,” and San Francisco Classical Voice described it as, “poetic and fantastical, visually stunning and relentlessly abstract.” Vireo was produced as part of Bielawa’s artist residency at Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana, California and in partnership with KCETLink and Single Cel. In February 2019, Vireo was released as a two CD + DVD box set on Orange Mountain Music, featuring all of the music and episodes.
In addition to being a leading composer, Bielawa has performed as the vocalist in the Philip Glass Ensemble since 1992. She also performs in many of her own works as well as the music of John Zorn, Anthony Braxton, Michael Gordon, and others. She recently made her orchestral conducting debut leading the Mannes String Orchestra in a special presentation by the Philip Glass Institute featuring her music, music by Jon Gibson and David T. Little, and Philip Glass’s Symphony No. 3.
A dedicated musical citizen, Lisa Bielawa was a co-founder in 1997 of the MATA Festival which continues to support young composers. For five years, she served as the artistic director of the San Francisco Girls Chorus, bringing the chorus to the NY PHIL BIENNIAL and introducing the young performers to the music of today through numerous premieres and commissions of leading composers. From 2019-2022, she was the founding Composer-in-Residence and Chief Curator of the Philip Glass Institute (PGI) at The New School’s College of the Performing Arts. She is currently the Howard Hanson Visiting Professor at the Eastman School of Music.
Bielawa’s latest album is Blueprints I, which features music that would have premiered at her residency at John Zorn’s The Stone, scheduled for the week in March 2020 that New York City went into lockdown, recorded by the performers at home. In addition to the complete opera Vireo (Orange Mountain Music), Bielawa’s My Outstretched Hand for the San Francisco Girls Chorus and The Knights was also released in 2019 (Supertrain Records), as well as Sanctuary Songs, which she recorded with violinist Jennifer Koh on the album Limitless (Cedille Records). Her discography includes The Lay of the Love (Innova), “Opening: Forest” from Vireo on the album Final Answer performed by the San Francisco Girls Chorus and Kronos Quartet (Orange Mountain Music); A Handful of World (Tzadik); The Trojan Women on a disc entitled First Takes (TROY); Hildegurls: Electric Ordo Virtutum, (Innova); The Trojan Women in a version for string quartet performed by the Miami String Quartet on The NYFA Collection (Innova); In medias res (BMOP/sound), a double-disc set of Bielawa’s solo and orchestral works; the world premiere recording of Chance Encounter (Orange Mountain Music); and Elegy-Portrait on pianist Bruce Levingston’s album, Heart Shadow (Sono Luminus).
Born in San Francisco into a musical family, Lisa Bielawa played the violin and piano, sang, and wrote music from early childhood. She moved to New York two weeks after receiving her B.A. in Literature in 1990 from Yale University and became an active participant in New York musical life.