Paola Prestini

Composer Paola Prestini is the co-founder and Artistic Director of the Brooklyn arts center National Sawdust. Since 1999, when she co-founded the multimedia production company VisionIntoArt (subsequently re-launched as National Sawdust Projects). She was recently named an “Innovator” on the list of Top 30 Professionals of the Year by Musical America. She is on Brooklyn Magazine’s latest list of “influencers of Brooklyn culture…in perpetuity” and is one of the Top 35 Female Composers in Classical Music (Washington Post). As part of her commitment to education and mentoring the next generation of musical artists, she started the Hildegard Competition, for emerging female, trans, and non-binary composers.

Prestini’s music and works have been commissioned by and performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, the Barbican Centre, the Cannes Film Festival, Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Opera, Roomful of Teeth, the Choir of Trinity Wall Street, and the Young People’s Chorus, and she is a frequent collaborator with Beth Morrison Projects. She has been a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow and a Sundance Fellow and was a graduate of The Juilliard School.