Luna Composition Lab Announces Festival
June 22-27, 2025

2023-24 Luna Lab Fellows with Kronos Quartet at SFJAZZ, June 2024

Luna Composition Lab announces its annual festival, featuring a performance of world premiere compositions by the 2024–25 fellows, performed by International Contemporary Ensemble on June 26 at 7:00 PM. Additional events include masterclasses with Han Lash, Angélica Negròn, Nina Shekhar, Charmaine Lee, and Mari Esabel Valverde, workshops with Jeff Beal and Willie Mae Rock Camp, and networking events for young composers.

Luna Composition Lab is “changing the playing field” (The New Yorker) by providing mentorship, performance opportunities, resources, and partnerships for young female, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming composers. Founded in 2016 by composers Missy Mazzoli and Ellen Reid, Luna Lab aims to achieve a broad, lasting, and positive impact in the field of music by empowering and emboldening the next generation of musicians and creative leaders.

By fostering a supportive, sustained, and professional community with young composers who are female, nonbinary, or gender nonconforming, Luna Composition Lab provides a model of inclusivity and artistic excellence for the field as a whole so that it can better reflect the society in which we live.

Luna Composition Lab’s signature program—the Luna Lab Fellowship—provides six young composers annually with a year of mentorship from an established female or nonbinary composer, along with professional performances and recordings of their work. 

The 2024–25 fellows—Sam Pichardo, Danity Pike, Mia Turakhia,  Zoe Verduin, Brannon Warn-Johnston, and Emilie Wolff—range in age from 14 to 17 and hail from California, Kansas, New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington. They are paired with mentor composers Han Lash, Wang Lu, Nkeiru Okoye, Angélica Negrón, Nina Shekhar, and Mari Esabel Valverde.

This season, Luna Composition Lab is delighted to be working with the International Contemporary Ensemble as our 2024–25 Ensemble in Residence. Members of the International Contemporary Ensemble have worked with fellows throughout the year to workshop their new pieces. The world premieres of these works, alongside works by our mentor composers Han Lash, Nkeiru Okoye, Angélica Negrón, and Mari Esabel Valverde, will be performed on June 26, 2025 at 7 PM in the Resnick Education Wing at Carnegie Hall. More Information

“We’re thrilled to ring in Luna Composition Lab’s ninth annual festival with a concert of world premieres performed by the virtuosic International Contemporary Ensemble at Carnegie Hall. This festival celebrates a year of expansion and new partnerships for Luna Composition Lab. We’re thrilled to be working with our new mentors Han Lash, Nkeiru Okoye, and Mari Esabel Valverde, and we’ve started partnerships across the country from New York to Tennessee, and California to Massachusetts. We have embarked on new collaborations with the New York Philharmonic and River & Rail, a Knoxville-based theater company, and we have continued our work with ChamberQUEER, loadbang, and Carnegie Hall. Our fellows' and alumni’s works were heard around the world, notably at Disney Hall, the Concertgebouw, and David Geffen Hall. As we look ahead to celebrating our organization’s first decade, we thank you for your everlasting support of fresh compositional voices.” —Missy Mazzoli and Ellen Reid

Luna Composition Lab continues to see the tangible, long-term results of its important work. Our alumni have gone on to attend the nation’s top colleges and conservatories, including the Curtis Institute of Music, Harvard University, Northwestern University, The Juilliard School, and more. They have been commissioned by renowned chamber ensembles and orchestras including the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Cincinnati Symphony, and Ensemble Intercontemporain. 100% of alumni were offered a professional commission in the 2022–23 season.

Meet The Fellows

Sam Pichardo (age 17) is a Dominican classical and jazz saxophonist raised in New York City. Sam’s musical career started from an early age on strings and then shifted to band. Sam has maintained a spot as the principal saxophone player in most groups they have been in. Sam has had the wonderful opportunity to play at Carnegie Hall twice! Sam finds inspiration from composers that are POC, especially Kelijah Dunton, Omar Thomas, and Kevin Day. Aside from music, Sam’s other hobby is writing poetry. Sam is very eager to learn new things and take on this new experience with Luna Lab.

Danity Pike (age 16) is a composer and multi-instrumentalist from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She began playing piano at the age of 7 and has been interested in music creation ever since. Danity is currently excited by conceptual composition techniques and performance in songwriting. Her music is often inspired by storytelling, navigating the world between poetry and composition. Danity has taken part in various composition programs, such as Wildflower Composers, Luna Lab’s Adventures in Sound, and the Walden School Young Musicians Program. Her past works have been performed by the Network for New Music Ensemble, Friction Quartet, and International Contemporary Ensemble.

Mia Turakhia (age 14) is a composer, violinist, and pianist from the San Francisco Bay Area. She is an 8th grader at The Nueva School and attends the San Francisco Conservatory of Music Pre-College. Introduced to composition by her piano teacher, Eva-Maria Zimmermann, Mia has continued to develop her skills at SFCM, studying violin with Alena Tsoi-Barantschik and composition with June Bonacich and Mauricio Rodriguez. She has participated in summer programs such as C’est Bon, Music at Tateuchi, and Heifetz. In spring 2024, Mia won the Kris Getz Composition Competition, and her work was premiered at the SFCM pre-college commencement.

Zoe Verduin (age 15) is a composer and violinist from Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. She is an advanced violin student at the Hoff Barthelson Music School in Westchester, where she also studies composition under the mentorship of Dr. Derek Cooper. Zoe has been awarded several scholarships in music composition, which is her passion, including an ASCAP Foundation scholarship to study at the Manhattan School of Music’s Summer Composition program. Her work was also selected for performance at the Young Composers Honors Concert at the annual NYSSMA conference. In her free time, she plays bass in a rock band.

Brannon Warn-Johnston (age 16) is an enthusiastic composer and multi-instrumentalist from Burien, Washington. She loves backpacking with her violin, often taking inspiration for her compositions from nature and the outdoors. Her compositions have been performed by the Seattle Symphony, Symphony Tacoma, Northwest Symphony Orchestra, Seattle Festival Orchestra, Seattle Youth Symphony Orchestras (SYSO), and Seattle Conservatory of Music. Brannon’s music has won awards from the Foundation for Modern Music International Composers Competition, Simon-Fiset Composition Competition, National Federation of Music Clubs Composers Contest, 2023 SYSO Inspiration Award, and more. Brannon has participated in the Merriman-Ross Young Composers Workshop at the Seattle Symphony for three years.

Emilie Wolff (age 17) is a composer and cellist from Overland Park, Kansas. She first started composing music on the cello and quickly grew from there. Having a deep love for both music and film, she now strives to create cinematic works of music that could fit a bigger picture. Emilie has studied composition at the Interlochen Arts Camp. She currently plays in her high school’s symphonic and chamber orchestras where she frequently writes and arranges a variety of music for both groups. She is also a part of Golden Hornet’s Young Composers’ Collective based out of Austin, Texas.

Artistic Directors

Missy Mazzoli

Recently deemed “one of the more consistently inventive, surprising composers now working in New York” (New York Times) and “Brooklyn’s post-millennial Mozart” (Time Out NY), Missy Mazzoli has had her music performed by the Kronos Quartet, LA Opera, eighth blackbird, the BBC Symphony, Scottish Opera and many others. She has been nominated for three Grammy Awards and in 2018 she became one of the first two women, along with Jeanine Tesori, to receive a main stage commission from the Metropolitan Opera. From 2018-2021 she was Composer-in-Residence at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and from 2012-2015 was Composer-in-Residence with Opera Philadelphia. The upcoming season includes performances by the Berlin Philharmonic, Detroit Opera, Pittsburgh Opera, Chicago Lyric Opera, Opera Philadelphia and many more. She teaches at Bard College and her works are published by G. Schirmer.

Ellen Reid

Ellen Reid is one of the most innovative artists of her generation. A composer and sound artist whose breadth of work spans opera, sound design, film scoring, ensemble and choral writing, she was awarded the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Music for her opera, p r i s m. Reid is the first composer to have been commissioned by all of Los Angeles’s four major classical music institutions: Los Angeles Opera at REDCAT, Los Angeles Philharmonic, L.A. Master Chorale and L.A. Chamber Orchestra. Ellen received her BFA from Columbia University and her MA from California Institute of the Arts.

Partners

Now in its third decade, the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) is a multidisciplinary collective of musicians, digital media artists, producers, and educators committed to building and innovating collaborative environments in order to inspire audiences to reimagine how they experience contemporary music and sound. The Ensemble creates a mosaic musical ecosystem as “America’s foremost new-music group” (The New Yorker), honoring the diversity of human experience and expression by commissioning, developing, recording, and performing the works of living artists.  Co-founded in 2001 by flutist and MacArthur “genius” Fellow Claire Chase, the Ensemble has premiered over 1,000 works.

 

Press Contact 

Nicki Sekhar, Program Manager
nicki@lunacompositionlab.org

 

Website
Luna Composition Lab

 

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