ABOUT

Zosha Di Castri, a Canadian “composer of riotously inventive works” (The New Yorker), currently lives in New York. Her music has been performed across Canada, the US, South America, Asia, and Europe and extends beyond purely concert music, including projects with electronics, sound arts, and collaborations with video and dance. She is the Francis Goelet Associate Professor of Music and Composition Area Chair at Columbia University.

Highlights this season include the world premiere of Invisible House for orchestra, which opens the New York Philharmonic’s season, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel. The piece will tour Europe with the NY Phil and be performed by the LA Philharmonic in the spring. New chamber works in 2026-27 include a duo for cellist Anssi Karttunen and organist Olivier Latry in memory of Kaija Saariaho, to be premiered at Maison de Radio-France, Paris, and a new work for oboist James Austin Smith to be premiered at Carnegie Hall.

Notable 2025/26 performances include the European premiere of Hunger for orchestra and improvising drummer at the Warsaw Autumn Festival, written to accompany Peter Foldes’ 1973 eponymous silent film; and Delve, a new string quartet written for Bozzini Quartet, which premiered in New York (TIME:SPANS), Utrecht (Gaudeamus Festival), Montréal (Le Vivier), and Toronto (Soundstreams). Other recent premieres include Noctiluca for large ensemble commissioned by the LA Phil and conducted by John Adams; TOUCH:TRACE for percussionist Steve Schick and International Contemporary Ensemble, commissioned by the Koussevitzky Music Foundation through the Library of Congress; and Pneumusique for Ensemble Paramirabo and Productions Totem Contemporain’s Table de Babel instrument.

Zosha curated an event showcasing her work as part of the New York Philharmonic’s Nightcap series. In addition, her song cycle In the Half-Light (2022), written for soprano Barbara Hannigan with libretto by Tash Aw, was premiered by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and performed again in February 2024 by the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal. She also recently wrote We live the opposite daring for six voices for Ekmeles in New York; time>>T. - - I. - - M.(time) - - E for large chamber ensemble premiered by the Grossman Ensemble in Chicago; Hypha, a quartet for clarinet, violin, cello, and piano/keyboard commissioned by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center; and Pentimento, an orchestra piece commissioned for the WDR Sinfonieorchester's 75th anniversary.

Zosha’s Long Is the Journey, Short Is the Memory for orchestra and chorus opened the first night of the 2019 BBC Proms at Royal Albert Hall, conducted by Karina Canellakis with the BBC Symphony and BBC Singers. Other large-scale projects include Dear Life, a 25-minute piece for soprano, recorded narrator and orchestra, based on a short-story by Alice Munro, and an evening-length new music theater piece/kinetic sound installation project, Phonobellow, co-written with David Adamcyk.

Zosha’s orchestral compositions have been commissioned by John Adams, the Toronto Symphony, the San Francisco Symphony, New World Symphony, Esprit Orchestra, the National Arts Centre Orchestra, the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, and the BBC, and have been featured by the New York Philharmonic, Tokyo Symphony, The Radio Filharmonisch Orkest, The Philadelphia Orchestra, Amazonas Philharmonic, and the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, among others. She has made appearances with the Chicago Symphony, the LA Phil, and the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, and has worked with many leading new music groups, including Talea Ensemble, Ekmeles, Yarn/Wire, the NEM, Ensemble Itinéraire, Ensemble Cairn, and JACK and Parker Quartets.

Zosha’s 2019 debut album Tachitipo was released on New Focus Recordings to critical acclaim. The title track was nominated for The JUNO Awards’ 2021 Classical Composition of the Year. Tachitipo was named in Best of 2019 lists by The New Yorker, I Care if You Listen, AnEarful, Sequenza21, and New York Music Daily, and praised as “a formidable statement. It is so comprehensively realized, institutionally ratified, and sensitive to the creative exigencies of the 21st century that one wants to send a copy of it to the publishers of textbooks for music history survey courses in the hope that it will be included in a last chapter or two” (I Care if You Listen).

Zosha is a recipient of the 2023 American Academy of Arts and Letters Goddard Lieberson Fellowship, the 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship, and was an inaugural fellow at the 2018-19 Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris. She received the Jules Léger Prize for New Chamber Music for her work Cortège in 2012, and participated in Ircam’s Manifeste Festival in Paris, writing an interactive electronic work for Thomas Hauert’s dance company, ZOO. She completed her Bachelors of Music in Piano Performance and Composition at McGill University, and her DMA in Composition at Columbia University.

Last updated September 2026

BIOS FOR PROGRAMS

Click here for a downloadable PDF with Zosha’s most recent biographies.

last updated September 2026