Olga Bell
Born in Moscow and raised in Alaska, OLGA BELL is an American composer, producer and performer based in Brooklyn. A prodigious classical pianist as a child and teenager, Bell graduated from the New England Conservatory in 2005, where her primary teachers were Patricia Zander and Victor Rosenbaum.
Bell started playing the piano at age seven and made her public debut two years later. At twelve Bell performed an original composition for piano and orchestra with her hometown Anchorage Symphony, at sixteen she was a concerto soloist with the Anchorage Civic Orchestra. As a chamber musician, Bell was a fellow of The Banff Centre, Yale’s Norfolk Festival and The Aspen Music Festival, where she coached with Claude Frank, Ann Schein and members of the Juilliard, Tokyo and St. Petersburg String Quartets.
Olga Bell’s story is not one of overnight success, but of determination, growth and relentless energy. Her work is steeped in these qualities: her writing is fearless, her voice heralded as “lustrous” (Consequence of Sound) and “powerful” (The New York Times). She’s remixed Chairlift, Son Lux, the music of Annie Clark and Caroline Shaw’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Partita. In 2009 she was selected by composer Osvaldo Golijov and soprano Dawn Upshaw for a workshop and concert at Carnegie Hall. In 2011 she received the a Jerome Fund Grant from the American Composers Forum, to aid in the completion of her first large-scale composition Krai, which will be released in 2014 by New Amsterdam Records after a premiere at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. She has toured in the US and abroad, performing at CocoRosie’s Donaufestival in Krems, Austria and opening for The Haxan Cloak at London’s Shacklewell Arms.
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