Tatiana Olivieri Catanzaro

Bio

Tatiana Catanzaro is a Brazilian-Italian composer, musicologist, and educator who moves between worlds as if they were resonances of a single gesture. Born in Brazil, shaped by Paris, and now rooted in California, she inhabits the borderlands of sound and thought. Her music does not represent—it makes audible. 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 her Ph.D. in Musicology from the Université de Paris IV – Sorbonne (summa cum laude, 2013), holds an M.A. in Musicology from both the Sorbonne and the Universidade de São Paulo (USP), and studied composition with Willy Corrêa de Oliveira, Silvio Ferraz, and Philippe Leroux before pursuing her Doctor of Musical Arts (DMA) in Composition at Stanford University under Patricia Alessandrini, Jonathan Berger, and Erik Ulman. She also completed the IRCAM Cursus in Paris and developed postdoctoral research with the STMS team, supported by FAPESP, focusing on psychoacoustics, neuroscience, and cognitive sciences.

Her career bridges 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 between 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, cultivating a pedagogy of generosity inspired by Paulo Freire: teaching as a practice of freedom, where knowledge is shared like breath. Her leadership extends to mentoring students, organizing international projects such as MUSITEC2, and publishing extensively 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 (2013).

Her compositions—performed in the Americas and Europe by ensembles such as 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 including Joana Holanda, Lidia Bazarian, Karin Fernandes, Rafaell Altino, Aleksandra Demowska-Madejska, and ensembles like Percorso and Quarteto Boulanger. She is also a recipient of the FUNARTE Classical Composition Prize (2019), a CAPES Doctoral Fellowship, and multiple FAPESP research grants.