Tatiana Olivieri Catanzaro

Bio

Tatiana Catanzaro is a Brazilian-Italian composer, musicologist, and educator. Born in Brazil, shaped by Paris, and now rooted in California, she inhabits the borderlands between sound and thought. Like Klee’s line that “goes for a walk,” her works trace the emergence of forms, giving voice to the invisible forces of life.

She earned a Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) in Composition at Stanford University (2026) under the guidance of Jonathan Berger, Erik Ulman, and Patricia Alessandrini. She also holds a Ph.D. in Musicology from the Université de Paris IV – Sorbonne (summa cum laude, 2013), an M.A. in Musicology from both the Sorbonne and the Universidade de São Paulo (USP), and, before her arrival in the United States of America, studied composition with Willy Corrêa de Oliveira, Silvio Ferraz, and Philippe Leroux. She completed the IRCAM Cursus in Paris and conducted postdoctoral research with the STMS team at IRCAM (France), alongside the Interdisciplinary Nucleus for Sound Communication (NICS/UNICAMP, Brazil), supported by FAPESP, focusing on psychoacoustics, neuroscience, and cognitive sciences.

Her career spans creation, research, and pedagogy. She served as Associate Professor of Composition and New Technologies at the Universidade de Brasília (UnB), where she founded the Laboratório LINES and the Grupo Interdisciplinar em Estudos do Som, fostering collaborations among music, science, and technology. In 2025, she was appointed Professor of Composition at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB).

As an educator, she builds communities of listening and inquiry where knowledge is shared and teaching is a practice of freedom. Her leadership extends to mentoring students, organizing international projects such as MUSITEC2 (CEMCPC, IRCAM, UFJF, UFMG, UFMS, UFRJ, UnB, UNICAMP, UNIRIO e USP - Brazil) and the 1st Contemporary Music Series Festival (CREATE/MAT/CCS, UCSB), and publishing in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes. Her work Transformações na linguagem musical contemporânea instrumental e vocal sob a influência da música eletroacústica entre as décadas de 1950–70 received the Funarte Prize for Critical Production in Music (Brazil, 2013).

Her compositions—performed in the Americas and Europe by ensembles including L’Itinéraire, Alternance, Cairn, Dal Niente, Percorso, and Quarteto Boulanger—blend acoustic and electronic elements, tracing the immanent emergence of sound. Her works have been recorded by soloists such as Joana Holanda, Lidia Bazarian, Karin Fernandes, Rafaell Altino, and Aleksandra Demowska-Madejska, as well as by ensembles including Percorso and Quarteto Boulanger. She has also received the FUNARTE Classical Composition Prize (2019), a CAPES Doctoral Fellowship (2005-2009), and multiple FAPESP research grants.