Recognized with artist fellowships from the John S. Guggenheim Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, composer-director AMY BETH KIRSTEN’S musical and conceptual language is characterized by an abiding interest in exploring theatrical elements of creation, performance, and presentation. Her body of work fuses music, language, voice, and theatre and often considers musicians’ instruments, bodies, and voices as equal vehicles of expression. Ms. Kirsten has written and composed fully-staged theatrical works as well as traditional concert works for her own ensemble, HOWL, musicians from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the New World Symphony, Peak Performances, the multi-Grammy-winning eighth blackbird, American Composers Orchestra, and many others.

Ms. Kirsten made her Carnegie Hall debut in 2014 with strange pilgrims, a concert work for chorus, orchestra, and film commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra. That season she was also the inaugural Composer-in-Residence for London’s Riot Ensemble who commissioned she is a myth and gave the U.K. premieres of several of her chamber works.

Guest lectures have included those at Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester (U.K.), Yale University, Princeton University, Curtis Institute, Cornell University, and the Royal Academy of Music in London.

Ms. Kirsten grew up in the suburbs of Kansas City and Chicago and was educated at Roosevelt University (MM) and the Peabody Institute (DMA). For the spring semester of 2020, she was appointed Kerr Composer-in-Residence at Oberlin College & Conservatory. She served on the faculty of the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University during the 2015-17 academic years before joining the Composition Faculty at Longy School of Music of Bard College in the Fall of 2017.