Paola Prestini

Biography

Prestini graduated from the Juilliard School, where she "had already developed a reputation as a formidable impresario even before she graduated". She studied there under Samuel Adler, Robert Beaser, and Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. She was also a PD Soros Fellow.

In 1999, while still a student, Prestini founded VisionIntoArt, an interdisciplinary arts company that established the annual 21c Liederabend festival, the Colorado Project at MASS MoCA, and a variety of multimedia collaborations. She is also the creative designer for the Original Music Workshop and the director of National Sawdust. Her programming endeavors "earned her large stores of gratitude in the new-music world".

She sits on the strategy committee for Prototype Festival. Some of the compositions she has written or is working on include Gilgamesh, Laybyrinth, Aging Magician, Epiphany, The Colorado, Oceanic Verses, Two Oars, and The Ribbon Project for Mass Re-Imaginings.

She has taught at various New York inner city schools and at academic institutions around Africa, Italy and Mexico.

Prestini's music has been commissioned by and performed at the following institutes: Carnegie Hall, Chicago Symphony, the New York Philharmonic, New York City Opera and the Kronos Quartet, and in non-U.S. venues. Recordings of her music have been released on VIA Records, Innova, and Tzadik Records, and her compositions have been published in the Arcana series by Hips Road.

She is the editor of the New York Philharmonic's Very Young Composer handbook.

Recognition and awards

The New York Times referred to Prestini as "the enterprising composer and impresario" and a "human resources alchemist". In 2011, she was named one of the Top 100 Composers in the World under 40 by National Public Radio. In 2001 Prestini was one of eight of America's “most promising composers in the early stages of their professional careers [to be] selected out of nearly 200 submissions received from around the country." Excerpts from The Hubble Cantata were praised as "the high point of the evening visually as well as musically” at Liederabend, Opus L.A. in April 2016.

Prestini received the Victor Herbert Award (ASCAP in 2014 and the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award for double string quartet and double bass (in 2002). She has also been the recipient of the NEFA grant Award of $75,000 in 2015, the New York State Council on the Arts, Individual Artist Grant in both 2006 and 2009.

In 2009, Prestini received first prize for her work Nightsong: For Solo Marimba in the Marimba/Cello Duo Category Classical Marimba League Composition, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Grant Award. She also received an American Music Center CAP Grant in 2004, 2007, 2008 and 2010; the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust for New Music Grant in 2008; the Trust for Mutual Understanding Grant in 2008; the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Grant/Swing Space Award in 2006; and the Monumental Brass Quintet Women's Commissioning Award in 2003. She also received the Paul and Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans and other fellowships from Carnegie Hall and the Sundance Institute, among others.

Prestini has held residencies at Florida's Hermitage Artist Retreat, LMCC Governor’s Island, MASS MoCA, The Park Avenue Armory, The Watermill Center and Wyoming's Ucross Foundation.