ABout Paola
“Is there any one person who’s doing more to reshape contemporary classical music in America than Paola Prestini?”
Biographical
- Born in Trento, Italy, immigrated shortly after to Nogales, Arizona
- Attended Interlochen Arts Academy in Composition
- Graduated The Juilliard School with her Masters in Composition
- Is married to cellist Jeffrey Zeigler, with whom she frequently collaborates
- Has a son Tommaso, who has his own Yo-Yo video channel on YouTube
- Her grandfather, Silvano Prestini, was a sought-after oboist who played at La Scala, and his father was an oboist and first oboist at La Scala and with the NBC orchestra under Toscanini. Her father, Giuseppe Prestini, continued the musical tradition through his company Prestini: Pads, Reeds and Musical Instruments Since 1890. The family immigrated to Nogales, Arizona where they had factories in the US and Mexico. The company continues to thrive. Get to know his world here.
Fun Facts
- Studied with composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies on the island of Hoy
- Spent a month going down the Colorado River for the project, The Colorado with filmmaker Murat Eyuboglu, conservationist and writer Bill de Buys, Mark Rylance, and Claire Van Kampen, a trip that remains a life highlight
- Helped create the textbook with Jon Deak for composing with kids for the NY Philharmonic, then taught it to young composers in Venezuela with El Sistema
- Loves boxing
- Has two tattoos, one designed by her sister
- Is a regular hiker and loves going for mushrooms in Northern Italy
Career Highlights
- November 2001 - Formed and incorporated her first group, VisionIntoArt
- October 2015 - Launched National Sawdust
- August 2016 - Composed, created and produced The Hubble Cantata, featuring the short Fistful of Stars, the world’s first Virtual Reality mass exploration of the cosmos alongside the Hubble Telescope that transports you inside of the Orion Nebula and reveals the cosmic connections between humans and the stars
- 2016 - Composed and Produced The Colorado, which has toured and been in over 30 film festivals and with presenters such as the Met Museum and The Kennedy Center
- 2017 - Started the Hildegard Competition, for emerging women and other marginalized genders, and the Blueprint Fellowship in partnership with the Juilliard School composition department
- 2018 - First Woman Commissioned in Minnesota Opera's New Works Initiative
- February 2020 - Commissioned to write for The New York Philharmonic's Project 19. Created Thrush Song with Maria Popova
Accolades
- Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans
- Sundance Fellow
- Artist in Residency with Park Avenue Armory
- Named one of “Top 100 Composers in the World” (NPR)
- “Top 30 Professionals of the Year” (Musical America)
- “Top 35 Female Composers in Classical Music” (The Washington Post)
- Brooklyn Magazine’s 2019 list of “influencers of Brooklyn culture…in perpetuity” alongside household names like Chuck Schumer and Spike Lee
- 2019 Clocktower Award by MASS MoCA in a gala honoring her and artists Nick Cave and Bob Faust.
- Resident at the American Academy of Rome
Dreams
- Collaborate on films with Paolo Sorrentino and Luca Guadagnino
- Bring My Brilliant Friend to the operatic stage, in honor of her lifelong friendship with her best friend, Carla Cota
Short Bio
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.
Long Bio
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 2025-26 season includes a site-specific production of her multidisciplinary work Houses of Zodiac in the Catacombs of Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery. The recording of the piece was lauded by Strings Magazine as "one of the greatest and most ambitious solo cello albums of all time," and the performances will feature Jeffrey Zeigler (formerly of the Kronos Quartet) on solo cello, and dancers Georgina Pazcoguin (former New York City Ballet soloist) and Dai Matsuoka (Butoh dance master of Sankai Juku), with poetry reading by the visionary Maria Popova. The season will also include the Mexico premiere and album release of her acclaimed processional opera Primero Sueño, which The New York Times praised, saying: "Just as the score mixes the devotional with almost rootsy strands, Herrera’s Sor Juana sings in an earthy mezzo that complements the heavenly harmonies of the six nuns in white, performed by the German vocal ensemble Sjaella." Her celebrated operatic re-imagining of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea will be performed at the Wexner Center for the Arts in a co-production by Opera Columbus and Beth Morrision Projects. She will also have two symphonic world premieres: a co-commission by the Tucson Symphony and a commission by the The Juilliard School, as well as a performance by Awadagin Pratt and the Dayton Philharmonic of her piano concerto Code, which NPR hailed as "uncanny...a rapturous confluence of strings, voices and Pratt's piano."
Prestini's 2024-25 season contained a staggering four world premieres of major opera and music-theater works across the United States. The premiere of her chamber opera Silent Light opened the 10th Anniversary Season of National Sawdust, the groundbreaking new music venue which Prestini co-founded, with critics praising the piece as "hypnotic" (The Wall Street Journal), "highly compelling" (The Observer), "spectacular" (Classical Voice North America), "arresting" (Opera Canada), and "at every point dramatically compelling" (Parterre). Her processional opera Primero Sueño, co-composed with Magos Herrera, was premiered to equally effusive reviews at the Met Museum Cloisters, with reviewers calling the work "a beguiling blend of elements drawn from folk, contemporary classical and 18th-century Baroque music" (Opera Magazine), "alternatingly gentle, mystical and joyous" (The Observer), and "timeless and otherworldly and, somehow, boldly, a product of New York City" (Bachtrack). PORT(AL), Prestini's innovative choral theater work co-created with Dianne Berkun Menaker, Jad Abumrad, and Jessica Grindstaff, had its sold-out premiere at the Brooklyn Navy Yard's Agger Fish Building, receiving acclaim for its ability "to tell a new story about not just a building, but also a port, a city, a country at war, a way of life" (Vogue), "to open hidden doorways into the past" (AIRMAIL), and "to display the same unbounded creativity that makes all of [Prestini's] large-scale theatrical works shine" (Oberon's Grove). Lastly, Prestini's expansive, multi-modal opera Sensorium Ex had its premiere at the Common Senses Festival in Omaha, Nebraska, and was the subject of national profiles in PBS NewsHour, NPR All Things Considered, Forbes, Opera Magazine, and more, offering a powerful example of how art can effect meaningful change both within its own industry, and throughout the world at large.
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 to feature a nonverbal lead, and its casting and creative development process, as well as its purpose-built AI technology, offer 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 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 received numerous awards for her groundbreaking work. In 2025 alone, she received the inaugural Doris Duke Performing Arts Technologies Lab Award, the Composers Now Visionary Award and a Creative Capital Award, and in previous years she has been honored as a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow, a Sundance Institute Film Music Program Fellow, and 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, and has received substantial support from the Ford Foundation, Mellon Foundation, and National Endowment for the Arts. 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 their son Tommaso Mareo Zeigler.
In her career, Paola Prestini regularly joins forces with other visionary talents to create extraordinary creations, leaving a singular imprint on the artistic ecosystem.
Unconventional collaborations
I anchor my musical identity most strongly to collaboration in all forms. I believe certain artistic experiences can only be unlocked with multiple minds working in tandem to realize a larger goal, and I have tied both my compositions and wider artistic legacy to that ideal. My most important artistic growth has come from collaborating with luminaries as divergent as conservationists, poets, virtual reality film directors, astrophysicists, or puppeteers, partially because I enjoy beginning with conceptual frames that help me tell bigger picture stories, a skill that conveniently also transfers to when I am composing less collaborative, more intimate work.
Influences
As an immigrant, many identities, cultures, and values have collided and interlocked within me over the years, helping create a synthesis of both unique and universal ideas that naturally manifest into music. On a more granular level, I infuse the inspiration of folk melody into the creation of original melodic lines that are deconstructed then supported with complex harmonies, rhythms, counterpoint and electronic worlds. Most recently, my work is mostly in opera, where I incorporate improvisation, live electronics, foley, and spatial elements. Early longstanding influences include the music of Palestrina and Monteverdi, John Zorn, (his life and music), Philip Glass and his early collaborative work, Meredith Monk and her structural based improvisations and compositions, the folk singers Mercedes Sosa and Fabrizio D’Andre, David Byrne (his music and curatorial eye) and John Cage’s writings and his seminal work Sonatas and Interludes.
Structural reform
Since my days as a student, I have believed that true change comes from structural reform. I’m proud to have manifested this through several non-profit ventures, the first of which being VisionIntoArt (VIA), an interdisciplinary arts company I co-founded in 1999. My work with VIA helped facilitate dozens of unique works only possible with multiple creative voices and areas of expertise working in tandem. Spearheading a more ambitious venture, the non-profit music institution National Sawdust, was my attempt to establish systems of creation that could endure outside of my personal creative inputs. I am especially interested in leveling the playing field for all and providing a wealth of resources for future generations of artists, and with this at its core, National Sawdust puts on more than 160 concerts per year and sponsors 8-10 residencies yearly. Many of those concerts are the result of collaborative efforts from disparate artists that we actively support, whether via financial support, technological support, workshop space, or professional development. Programs especially near to my heart include the Hildegard Commission, which directs resources to emerging women and nonbinary composers, and the BluePrint Fellowship, a commissioning course that offers women mentors within the composition program at the Juilliard School.
Collaborations
My theory is simple: the potential of multiple minds is greater than one. If the minds come from disparate worlds, even better. Twenty years of collaborating has granted me a bounty of experience, and I always learn something new from watching how others ingest the sometimes delightful, sometimes contentious process of working with other brilliant creatives. Each artist’s passion for their ideas reminds me that even in the hardest collaborative processes, one’s identity is not lost, only rediscovered and reaffirmed. Each project I embark on or witness continues the learning process for me, and is a deeply thrilling ride. My life’s work is to set these moments of clarity and creativity into motion as often as possible.
Active Hope Podcast
Active Hope explores how the country’s vanguard artists and arts leaders can shape this transformational, historical, and polarizing moment in history. After emerging from a global quarantine while still figuring out what the new normal is, the second season of our podcast orbits the theme of “Organizing Hope”. Our hosts and their guests of wide-ranging backgrounds investigate the uncertainty of the post-pandemic world from the unique perch of executive leadership at some of our country’s foremost arts institutions. Join an engaging conversation with Director and Executive Producer at the Apollo Theater Kamilah Forbes; poet, TED Global Fellow, and Kennedy Center Vice President/Artistic Director of Social Impact Marc Bamuthi Joseph; and composer and Artistic Director/Co-Founder of National Sawdust Paola Prestini.
Student CoLab
At the core of National Sawdust’s mission is the belief in artistic expression to empower us all to create a more inclusive world. Our flagship education program, Student CoLab, aims to engage young people in this idea by using the power of music discovery to inspire interdisciplinary art making which reflects their own experience of the world, impacting both their lives and the lives of people within their community.
Our partners, El Puente Beacon Leadership Program’s mission is to promote youth leadership through arts and activism to empower student voice, providing opportunities to engage in inquiry-based and project-based learning. Each year, Student CoLab engages up to twenty young people from the school to participate in a three-month program of workshops and performances.
Blueprint Fellowship
The BluePrint Fellowship program is designed to further inspire compositional and music students to dream about building their lives as artists. It is National Sawdust’s belief that by interacting with real-world mentors and applying lessons and ideas in real-world settings with the actual application of their craft, students will be better equipped for building a livelihood as an artist outside of the traditional classroom. This program is thereby designed to help students think about, plan and execute a “blueprint” to achieve their dreams.
Hildegard Competition
The Hildegard Commission is our mentorship initiative highlighting outstanding trans, female, and nonbinary composers in the early stages of their careers, supporting them with a commission, visionary mentorship, and access to a network of leading working collaborators.
In addition to a $7,000 cash prize, a commission for Pierrot-plus ensemble, a professional performance, and a live recording, the three winning composers will receive one-on-one mentorship with established figures in the field who also serve as judges for the competition, led by Paola Prestini, Composer, Co-Founder and Artistic Director at National Sawdust, and including composer and vocalist Joan La Barbara, composer and sound artist Gavin Rayna Russom, and composer and multi-instrumentalist Angélica Negrón. Following this period of mentorship, the commissioned works will be performed at National Sawdust in by conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya and the National Sawdust Ensemble, led by Jeffrey Zeigler, cellist and former Kronos Quartet member, and recorded live in our state-of-the-art hall for an album that will be released on National Sawdust Tracks.
NYU Center for Ballet Arts Lab
The Toulmin Fellowships in Music and Dance is a partnership with The Center for Ballet and the Arts (CBA) at NYU which provides opportunities for women composers and choreographers to collaborate, a rare opportunity in the field. In 2022, six Fellows (3 composers and 3 choreographers) will receive $5,000 each for a performance of the work they develop at the CBA studio with customized mentorship from NS.
“A devotional space for far-out sounds.”
“A vibrant space where artists and musicians can hone their craft.”
Paola co-founded National Sawdust in 2015.
National Sawdust’s mission is rooted in music discovery that is open, inclusive, and based in active mentorship of emerging artists, while building new audiences and communities of music devotees.
National Sawdust engages artists in an ecosystem of incubation to dissemination, programming groundbreaking new music in our state-of-the-art Williamsburg venue, and developing and touring new, collaborative music-driven projects — the National Sawdust DNA produces and presents world-class artistic work which embraces a wide stylistic approach to music.
National Sawdust believes in being an innovative leader in changing the landscape of contemporary music, by bringing all voices to the stage and beyond — artistic representation that reflects the ever-evolving multicultural society in which we live.
As a composer, I believe the role of an artist in the 21st century is that of creator, educator, activist, and entrepreneur. I believe that 21st-century artists need to be thinking about how they can affect their communities, on a local and global scale. At National Sawdust, supporting emerging artists is our core mission, nurturing a wide array of voices who are collectively reshaping the landscape of new music for this new century.
-Paola
“VisionIntoArt… has facilitated flamboyant, confounding and enticing collaborations among choreographers, visual artists, actors and composers…”
VisionIntoArt is a non-profit new music & interdisciplinary arts production company in New York City. Since Paola Prestini co-founded the company in 1999 at the Juilliard School, VIA has created and performed over twenty five original works as well as many releases through their self titled record label. With the belief that collaboration sustains artistic innovation, VIA creates and commissions works that involve various disciplines, presented around the world for the general audience, and forged from the most exciting emerging and established artists living today as well as interdisciplinary experts including scientists and conservationists.