Gabriela Lena Frank

Cultural heritage has always been central to the musical life of Gabriela Lena Frank. Born in Berkeley, California to a mother of mixed Peruvian/Chinese ancestry and a father of Lithuanian/Jewish descent, Gabriela is constantly exploring her multicultural ancestry through her compositions. Inspired by the likes of Bartók and Ginastera, she has travelled extensively throughout South America in pursuit of folklore and indigenous musics that are then incorporated into her own Western classical framework.

Moreover, she writes, "There’s usually a story line behind my music; a scenario or character." Her original program notes often enhance the listener’s experience, for they describe how a piano part mimics a marimba or pan-pipes, or how a movement is based on a particular type of folk song, where the singer is mockingly crying. Even a brief glance at her titles evokes specific imagery: Leyendas (Legends): An Andean Walkabout; La Llorona (The Crying Woman): Tone Poem for Viola and Orchestra; and Concertino Cusqueño (Concertino in the Cusco style). 

In 2025, Gabriela concluded a long-term residency with the Philadelphia Orchestra, marked by the world premiere of Picaflor: A Future Myth. She was also inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2026, her first opera The Last Dream of Frida and Diego will be staged at both the Metropolitan Opera and the Lyric Opera of Chicago. With a libretto by the Pulitzer-prizewinning playwright Nilo Cruz, The Last Dream of Frida Diego is one of the most successful American operas of the decade, with acclaimed runs at Los Angeles Opera and San Francisco Opera following its 2022 world premiere at San Diego Opera. Other upcoming premieres include two collaborations with MacArthur Fellow J. Drew Landham; a song cycle for the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, and a work for the Pacifica Quartet and narrator Sigourney Weaver. 

Winner of a Latin Grammy and nominated for Grammys as both composer and pianist, Gabriela also holds a Guggenheim Fellowship and a USA Artist Fellowship. Her work has been described as ‘crafted with unself-conscious mastery’ by The Washington Post, who also cited her as one of the most significant women composers in history. She has received commissions and performances from leading American orchestras including the Chicago Symphony, the Boston Symphony, the Atlanta Symphony, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Houston Symphony and the San Francisco Symphony. She has also been commissioned by cellist Yo-Yo Ma, soprano Dawn Upshaw, the King’s Singers, the Cuarteto Latinoamericano with guitarist Manuel Barrueco, and Brooklyn Rider, and has collaborated with conductors Marin Alsop, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Mei-Ann Chen, Rei Hotoda, David Robertson, and Andres Orozco-Estrada. In 2026, NAXOS will release a recording of her and Nilo Cruz’s oratorio Conquest Requiem, featuring the Nashville Symphony and conductor Giancarlo Guerrero. 

Gabriela Lena Frank is also an educator and climate activist. In 2017, she founded the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music (GLFCAM), which helps composers of any aesthetic and demographic, from emerging through mid-career levels, to develop self-determined 21st century lives. She has also written about composing with hearing loss as a guest columnist with The New York Times. In 2020, Gabriela was a recipient of the prestigious 25th-anniversary Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanity category with an unrestricted cash prize of $250,000. The award recognized Gabriela for breaking gender, disability, and cultural barriers in the classical music industry, and for her work as an activist on behalf of emerging composers from all walks of life.

Gabriela is the subject of several scholarly books including the W.W. Norton Anthology: The Musics of Latin America; Women of Influence in Contemporary Music: Nine American Composers (Scarecrow Press); and In her Own Words (University of Illinois Press). She is also the subject of several PBS documentaries including “Compadre Huashayo” regarding her work in Ecuador composing for the Orquestra de Instrumentos Andinos comprised of native highland instruments; and Música Mestiza, regarding a workshop she led at the University of Michigan composing for a virtuoso septet of a classical string quartet plus a trio of Andean panpipe players. Músic Mestiza, created by filmmaker Aric Hartvig, received an Emmy Nomination for best Documentary Feature in 2015.

Civic outreach is an essential part of Gabriela’s work. She has volunteered extensively in hospitals and prisons, with her current focus on developing the music school program at Anderson Valley High School, a rural public school of modest means with a large Latino population in Boonville, CA.

Gabriela attended Rice University in Houston, Texas, where she earned a B.A. (1994) and M.A. (1996). She studied composition with Sam Jones, and piano with Jeanne Kierman Fischer. At the University of Michigan, where she received a D.M.A. in composition in 2001, Gabriela studied with William Bolcom and Leslie Bassett, and piano with Logan Skelton. She currently resides in Boonville, a small rural town in the Anderson Valley, with her husband Jeremy on their mountain farm, has a second home in her native Berkeley in the San Francisco Bay Area, and has traveled extensively in Andean South America.
 
Gabriela Lena Frank is exclusively managed and published by G. Schirmer, Inc. part of the Wise Music Group.  

— October 2025