Lisa Bielawa

Lisa Carol Bielawa (born in San Francisco, California, September 30, 1968) is a composer and vocalist. She is a 2009 Rome Prize winner in Musical Composition and spent a year composing as a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.

Bielawa was born in San Francisco. Her father is composer and retired San Francisco State music professor Herbert Bielawa. Having been raised in a musical environment, she has been musically active since early childhood, learning piano, voice, and violin in addition to writing music. Bielawa's beginnings as a composer were unintentional, "I'd write cabaret songs and pieces for the San Francisco Girls Chorus, but it never felt entirely serious." She continued to perform and write music, but studied English at Yale for her undergraduate degree, after receiving which, resumed her career in music.

She moved to New York two weeks after receiving her B.A. in Literature in 1990 from Yale University, and became an active participant in New York musical life. She began touring with the Philip Glass Ensemble in 1992. She counts Glass among her compositional influences. In 1997 she co-founded the MATA Festival, which celebrates the work of young composers. Bielawa is currently the Artistic Director of the San Francisco Girls Chorus.

Ms. Bielawa’s chamber music has been performed in New York at Judson Memorial Church, The Brooklyn Museum, and Symphony Space. She curated the Boston Modern Orchestra Project’s Club Concerts. Other performances include Chance Encounter, a piece comprising songs and arias constructed of speech overheard in transient public spaces, by soprano Susan Narucki and The Knights at the Whitney Museum of American Art; unfinish’d, sent by the Yerevan Ensemble of Soloists in Armenia; and "Topos Nostalgia" from Chance Encounter with Ms. Bielawa as the soprano in Salzburg. World premieres in 2009 included Portrait-Elegy; The Project of Collecting Clouds at Seattle Town Hall by cellist Joshua Roman and chamber ensemble; and in medias res, a concerto for orchestra commissioned by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP), the culmination of Bielawa’s three-year residency with that orchestra. Bielawa's latest project is a new opera called Vireo: The Spiritual Biography of a Witch’s Accuser, composed by Lisa Bielawa on a libretto by Erik Ehn and directed by Charles Otte. The opera is unprecedented in that it is being created expressly for episodic release via broadcast and online media.

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