Paola Prestini
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. 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. May 22-25, 2025,Prestini’s expansive, multi-modal opera Sensorium Ex will have its world premiere presented by the Common Senses Festival in Omaha, Nebraska, in a co-presentation by VisionIntoArt and Beth Morrison Projects. 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 Time Like a Rolling Stream, which features Julian Crouch and Sandbox Percussion and will be presented by Pike Opera in Milford, PA.
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.
