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 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.
