Composer, producer, and vocalist Lisa Bielawa (b. 1968) is 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. She is the recipient of the 2017 Music Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters and a 2020 OPERA America Grant for Female Composers. 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. Bielawa has established herself as one of today’s leading composers and performers, who consistently executes work that incorporates community-making as part of her artistic vision. She has created music for public spaces in Lower Manhattan, the banks of the Tiber River in Rome, on the sites of former airfields in Berlin in 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; she was a co-founder in 1997 of the MATA Festival which continues to support young composers; and for five years she was 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, Bielawa 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. 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.” Recent concert highlights for Bielawa include the New York premiere of her violin concerto Sanctuary at Carnegie Hall by Jennifer Koh and the American Composers Orchestra (ACO), conducted by Marin Alsop. Sanctuary was co-commissioned by the Orlando Philharmonic (which premiered the piece), Carnegie Hall, ACO, and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP). The piece is inspired by the layered meanings of the word ’sanctuary’ within American consciousness, and is the culmination of a large-scale research project Bielawa undertook during her fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society. Other highlights include the world premiere of Voters’ Litany, a commission from the Cathedral Choral Society that marked the centennial of the 19th Amendment, which was premiered at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC; and Land Sea Sky, a commission from the Radcliffe Choral Society (RCS) premiered by RCS with members of BMOP. Bielawa describes Land Sea Sky as, “a joyful retelling of three young women's stories of journeying.” The work is a response to young people facing a pandemic-interrupted education and an uncertain path forward. Bielawa’s recent large-scale participatory works include Broadcast from Home, Voters’ Broadcast, and Brickyard Broadcast. Described by The Washington Post as “spellbinding,” Broadcast from Home was realized online throughout the period of the coronavirus lockdown, and featured over 500 submitted testimonies and recorded voices from six continents. Voters’ Broadcast’s mission was to stimulate voter engagement, political awareness, and community participation in challenging lockdown conditions, through the act of giving voice to the concerns of fellow citizens, during the lead-up to the 2020 Presidential election. It was commissioned as part of the Democracy & Debate theme-semester by the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor with support from its School of Music, Theatre & Dance, and developed in partnership with Kaufman Music Center in New York. Brickyard Broadcast was a spatialized work for hundreds of musicians commissioned by North Carolina State University that had its world premiere in a Virtual Reality (VR) environment designed by the digital media teams at the NC State University Libraries in November 2020. Previous Broadcast projects have included Airfield Broadcasts, a massive 60-minute work for hundreds of musicians that premiered on the tarmac of the former Tempelhof Airport in Berlin (Tempelhof Broadcast, May 2013) and at Crissy Field in San Francisco (Crissy Broadcast, October 2013). Bielawa turned these former airfields into vast musical canvases, as professional, amateur and student musicians executed a spatial symphony. Her work Mauer Broadcast was a series of pop-up choral performances at locations including the Brandenburg Gate and Alexanderplatz for the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 2019. Bielawa’s Chance Encounter is a piece comprising songs and arias constructed of speech overheard in transient public spaces, which was premiered by soprano Susan Narucki and The Knights in Lower Manhattan's Seward Park. A project of Creative Capital, the 35-minute work for roving soprano and chamber ensemble has since been performed at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, in Vancouver, Venice, and in Rome on the banks of the Tiber River in partnership with urban placemaker Robert Hammond, a founder of The High Line in New York.