About Hannah Ishizaki

Hannah Ishizaki is a composer and sound artist based in Princeton, New Jersey. Described as “Imaginative…effective and moving” by the New York Times, her music seeks to foster connections between musicians and the audience through the explorations of the physicality of music performance. Ishizaki finds inspiration in the process of composition, leading her to experiment with a wide range of instruments and sound generating methods—from acoustic instruments in an orchestra to digital sensors to rocks and zippers. Immersed in the world of collaboration, Ishizaki has worked with dancers, actors, filmmakers, and visual artists, to connect the seemingly unconnected and create innovative and multidisciplinary projects.

​Ishizaki’s work has been recognized throughout the United States and Internationally, and her compositions have been performed by renowned musicians and ensembles such as Midori Goto, Ensemble Intercontemporain, The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, The Juilliard Orchestra, the National Sawdust Ensemble Intercontemporain, Karen Gomyo, Nathan Meltzer, Kevin Zhu, Mira Wang, Guy Johnston, Sterling Elliot, and Umi Garrett. Recently, Ishizaki was named one of five 2023 Hildegard commission winners, which is presented by National Sawdust and generously supported by The Onassis Foundation and the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation. In 2017, she became the youngest woman ever to have a world premiere with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra (PSO). In 2022, she was selected as one of four winners of Juilliard’s Orchestral Composition Competition, and her work, “Fractured Transformations” was premiered by the Juilliard Orchestra with Maestro Jeffrey Milarsky on April 18, 2022 in Alice Tully Hall.

 In the summer of 2022, Ishizaki was the artist-in-residence for the Stiftung für Kunst und Musik, Dresden, writing a variety of chamber, orchestral, and vocal works based on the deconstruction of words and meaning. During her time in Dresden, she completed a String Octet that was premiered at the closing concert of the Moritzburg Festival. In March of 2022, she completed a residency in the Henriquez (“The Boat”) Studio at Banff, where she researched and conceptualized for an evening-length work for the sounds of dance.

 Ishizaki is currently a PhD student in Music Composition and a recipient of the Mark Nelson Fellowship at Princeton University. Previous teachers have included David Ludwig and Chris Massa. She studied with Andrew Norman for composition and Areta Zhulla and Ronald Copes for violin at the Juilliard School, where she was the first composer to receive a Kovner Fellowship.

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