Composer and vocalist Lisa Bielawa is a 2009 Rome Prize winner in musical composition and a 2017 recipient of the Music Award of the American Academy of Arts & Letters. She began touring with the Philip Glass Ensemble in 1992, and in 1997, she co-founded the MATA Festival, highlighting the work of young composers. Bielawa was appointed artistic director of the acclaimed San Francisco Girls Chorus in 2013 and is an artist in residence at Grand Central Art Center. In 2013, Bielawa completed Airfield Broadcasts, a 60-minute work for more than 600 musicians, which premiered on the tarmac of the former Tempelhof Airport in Berlin and at Crissy Field in San Francisco.
Bielawa received a 2020 Discovery Grant from OPERA America’s Opera Grants for Female Composers. She was named a William Randolph Hearst Visiting Artist Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society for 2018 and is Artist-in-Residence. She is composer of Vireo, an episodic opera, released by KCET for free on-demand streaming in 2017. Bielawa served as the Center’s music panel chair in 2013, as a panelist in Performance in 2014, and as a panelist for Pew Fellowships in 2017.
