Hannah Ishizaki

Hannah Ishizaki is a composer and sound artist based in Princeton, New Jersey. Described by The New York Times as “Imaginative…effective and moving,” her music seeks to foster connections between musicians and audiences through explorations of the physicality of performance. She draws inspiration from the compositional process itself, experimenting with a wide range of instruments and sound-generating methods—from traditional orchestral forces to digital sensors, rocks, and zippers. Deeply committed to collaboration, Ishizaki has created multidisciplinary projects with dancers, actors, filmmakers, and visual artists.

Her works have been performed internationally by leading musicians and ensembles including Midori Goto, Ensemble Intercontemporain, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Juilliard Orchestra, the National Sawdust Ensemble, Karen Gomyo, Nathan Meltzer, Kevin Zhu, Mira Wang, Guy Johnston, Sterling Elliott, and Umi Garrett. Recent commissions include a new work for the Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center with conductor Jonathon Heyward, scheduled for summer 2026, and a return to the Dresdner Musikfestspiele with a new commission for spring 2026. In 2023, she was named one of five Hildegard Commission winners presented by National Sawdust, supported by the Onassis Foundation and Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation. Earlier, she became the youngest woman to premiere a work with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra (2017) and won Juilliard’s Orchestral Composition Competition (2022), leading to the premiere of Fractured Transformations at Alice Tully Hall with Maestro Jeffrey Milarsky.

Her residencies have included the Stiftung für Kunst und Musik in Dresden (2022), where she premiered a String Octet at the Moritzburg Festival, and the Henriquez Studio at the Banff Centre, where she researched an evening-length work exploring the sounds of dance.

Ishizaki is a PhD candidate in Music Composition at Princeton University and a recipient of the Mark Nelson Fellowship. She previously studied with David Ludwig and Chris Massa, and at The Juilliard School with Andrew Norman (composition) and Areta Zhulla and Ronald Copes (violin), where she became the first composer to receive a Kovner Fellowship.

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YCA represents composer Hannah Ishizaki for worldwide engagements. Please contact us for more information.