Frank J. Oteri
|
September 8, 2014

Paola Prestini: Following Her Vision

Frank J. Oteri
|
September 8, 2014

Paola Prestini: Following Her Vision

Frank J. Oteri
|
September 8, 2014

Paola Prestini: Following Her Vision

Paola Prestini combines wild imagination and controlled practicality on an almost molecular level—it’s as if both are fused together in her DNA. Whether she’s talking about her own multimedia operas or VisionIntoArt, the interdisciplinary arts production company she co-founded 15 years ago, she tends to think big but she always manages to make it happen.

Paola Prestini combines wild imagination and controlled practicality on an almost molecular level—it’s as if both are fused together in her DNA. The first time I met her, back when she was a composition at Juilliard, she was already talking about creating genre-blurring discipline-blurring audience experiences and, together with her then-classmate Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum, had formed a non-profit organization in order to make these experiences happen.

“We wanted something that, when shortened, would sound like a woman’s name—so VIA,” she explained when I talked with her last month in her Crown Heights apartment. “Then we liked the fact that ‘via’ was a street, a way to go. And we knew that it was to be a multimedia company; we wanted to really integrate new music with other forms, other structures, other disciplines. And so VisionIntoArt became a very perfect word for the kind of art that we wanted to help create and that we wanted to create ourselves.”

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