Composer and sonic artist Nina C. Young (b.1984) creates works spanning acoustic concert music, electroacoustic and computer music, spatial audio, installation, and multimedia performance. Moving fluidly among these arenas, she approaches sound with both a composer’s imagination and an engineer’s curiosity—attentive to the human gestures that bring sound into being, the spaces that shape it, and the relationships among people, instruments, and technologies that make each sonic encounter unrepeatable.

Young’s musical language draws from spectral, minimalist, modernist, and experimental traditions while remaining in active dialogue with the Western classical canon and its evolving ideas of virtuosity. She draws earlier music into new contexts as quotation, fragment, or half-remembered trace, exploring how inherited music persists imperfectly in memory—how it can be submerged, transformed, and made newly present. Recurring fascinations with resonance, timbre, and ephemera become the foundation for immersive sonic worlds: spaces that invite listeners momentarily outside ordinary time and into experiences that can feel hallucinatory, nostalgic, uncanny, or touched by magical realism. Her work is also shaped by interests in poetry, storytelling, representation, historical narrative, and the sounds, mythologies, and musical practices connected to her Slavic ancestry.

Winner of the 2015–16 Rome Prize and a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship, Young has also received commissions, fellowships, and recognition from the Koussevitzky Music Foundation, Fromm Music Foundation, American Academy of Arts and Letters, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Bogliasco Foundation, and Montalvo Arts Center. Her music has been presented by the National Gallery of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra’s Liquid Music series, and performed by ensembles including the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Minnesota Orchestra, the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, the Grossman Ensemble, the JACK Quartet, the Aizuri Quartet, the PRISM Quartet, Sixtrum, Matt Haimovitz, and others.

Her recent work reflects the breadth of her practice. Commissioned by Carnegie Hall and premiered by the American Composers Orchestra with baritone Sidney Outlaw, Out of whose womb came the ice is a multimedia monodrama combining orchestra, electronics, and generative video to revisit the ill-fated Shackleton Trans-Antarctic Expedition. For Hub New Music, Young created to hear the things we cannot see, an intimate work for chamber ensemble and electronics featuring the poetry and recorded voice of Rosie Stockton. Her large-scale installation Nothing is not borrowed, in song and shattered light draws fragments of music by Josquin and Gabrieli into recordings by the American Brass Quintet, using EMPAC’s high-resolution Wave Field Synthesis loudspeaker array to explore ritual, polyphony, tuning, and the movement of sound through space.

Young’s recent acoustic works include Tread softly, which opened the New York Philharmonic’s Project 19; Violin Concerto: Traces, written for Jennifer Koh and co-commissioned by the Philadelphia Orchestra and Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra; and Fern Flower (Tsvetok Paporotnika), a solo piano work written for Han Chen. Drawing upon Slavic mythology, Fern Flower forms the seed of a larger piano concerto currently in progress.

Young is a member of the composition faculty at The Juilliard School and serves on the faculty and as Composition Program Coordinator at the Tanglewood Music Center. She has previously taught at the University at Buffalo, USC Thornton School of Music, UT Austin’s Butler School of Music, the Peabody Institute, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She holds degrees from MIT, McGill University, and Columbia University, and her music is published by Peermusic Classical.

ninacyoung.com

[Bio current as of September 2026]