I was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and began my musical training at a very young age at the Conservatório Musical Heitor Villa-Lobos, later continuing at the Conservatório Brasileiro de Música. In my late teens, I studied privately with the late composer Almeida Prado before moving to the United States to pursue undergraduate and graduate studies in Composition. During my doctoral studies at Northwestern University, I became deeply immersed in Chicago’s experimental music scene, forming long-term creative relationships and co-founding Ensemble Dal Niente. After teaching at Columbia College Chicago, I moved to New York in 2014 to join the faculty at Montclair State University, followed by a professorship at the University of California San Diego. In 2022, I returned to New York, where I am the Fritz Reiner Professor of Musical Composition at Columbia University. During the summers, I also teach composition and co-coordinate the composition program at the Tanglewood Music Center. I became an American citizen in 2024, once it became possible to do so while maintaining my Brazilian citizenship. Both countries are home to me, as is New Zealand, where my husband is from.
I am a queer Black composer whose work grows out of experimental music and long-standing engagement with Afrodiasporic and Afrofuturistic thought. At the center of my practice is collaboration, not simply as a practical necessity, but as a creative philosophy. I am drawn to processes that ask what music can be, how it is made, and who gets to shape it. Many of my projects develop through extended workshops rather than traditional rehearsal models, allowing ideas to emerge gradually through dialogue, shared labor, and sustained listening. This approach has led me to work with a wide range of people and contexts, including non-musicians, classical and popular musicians, dancers, poets, scholars, community organizations, and groups focused on social change.
I describe my compositional approach as resonant humanism. By this, I mean a way of making music that places human presence, vulnerability, and attentive listening at the center of the work. Rather than treating sound as something imposed by a composer and executed by performers, I understand it as something that emerges through bodies, spaces, and relationships. My music often favors resonance over force, interaction over display, and instability over control. Musical gestures are frequently fragile and open-ended, inviting performers to navigate uncertainty and difference together in real time.
Much of my work draws inspiration from Yorùbá mythological cosmology, especially through the orishas. I approach these traditions not as symbols to be illustrated, but as living systems of thought. They have shaped many of my works, spanning acoustic and electroacoustic solo pieces, chamber music, large ensembles, and full orchestral works. Across these pieces, myth, ritual, and history serve as starting points for exploring sound, movement, labor, and technology, while remaining attentive to histories of displacement, erasure, and resilience.
As fortunate as I am to work regularly with well-known artists, ensembles, and orchestras around the world, long-term, close collaboration with specific performers remains at the very heart of my practice. Many of my works grow out of creative relationships that have developed over many years, grounded in trust, shared curiosity, and a genuine investment in one another’s artistic growth. My collaborations with artists such as flutist and educator Claire Chase, conductor and bassoonist Rebekah Heller, violist and curator Nadia Sirota, and the late saxophonist Ryan Muncy reflect more than two decades of close dialogue and mutual artistic exploration. These relationships are not only professional, but deeply personal, shaping the music through repeated experimentation, conversation, and a willingness to take risks together. I have had the privilege of working closely with many of the most dedicated conductors, performers and ensembles in the new music community, including a particularly long and meaningful partnership with the International Contemporary Ensemble, with whom I have collaborated for twenty years.
My work as a composer is inseparable from my work as an educator and public thinker. In academic settings, I design courses that foreground diverse musical traditions, critical engagement with history, and experimental approaches to sound. Beyond the university, I regularly take part in public conversations about music and culture through workshops, audience talks, and interdisciplinary panels with artists, architects, playwrights, and scholars. I see these activities not as side projects or outreach, but as integral to how I understand composition itself: a shared inquiry that remains open to other forms of knowledge, lived experience, and collective thinking.
At heart, my desire as an artist is to be in conversation with others, and especially with people whose experiences, perspectives, and ways of listening differ from my own. I am most drawn to situations where music becomes a meeting place, a space for exchange, curiosity, and mutual transformation.