About gabriela
Recently inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters (May, 2025) and included in the Washington Post's list of the most significant women composers in history (August, 2017), identity has always been at the center of composer/pianist Gabriela Lena Frank's music. Born in Berkeley, California (September, 1972), to a mother of indigenous Peruvian/Chinese ancestry and a father of Lithuanian/Jewish descent, Gabriela explores her multicultural heritage through her compositions. Inspired by the works of Bela Bartók and Alberto Ginastera, Gabriela has traveled extensively throughout South America in creative exploration. Her music often reflects not only her own personal experience as a multi-racial Latina and diaspora daughter, but also refract her studies of Latin American cultures, incorporating poetry, mythology, and native musical styles into a western classical framework that is uniquely her own.
Moreover, she writes, "There's usually a story line behind my music; a scenario or character." While the enjoyment of her works can be obtained solely from her music, the composer's program notes 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; Concertino Cusqueño (Concertino in the Cusco style); and the ten-scene Picaflor (Hummingbird): A Future Myth.
Gabriela extends her storytelling into creating the dramaturgy for her vocal works such as the Conquest Requiem, a large-scale choral/orchestral work in Spanish, Latin, and Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, about Malinche, the native mistress and translator for conquistador Hernán Cortes, premiered by the Houston Symphony under Andrés Orozco-Estrada; and the upcoming Songs of John James Audubon and the Runaway Slave for baritone and orchestra based on the essay and novella work of MacArthur Fellow J. Drew Lanham for the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. Gabriela enjoys serving as her own librettist for her music, such as composing the texts for Pachamama Meets an Ode, a magic-realist meditation on Peru’s colonization during Beethoven’s lifetime, for chorus and orchestra commissioned by the Philadelphia Orchestra, unveiled at Carnegie hall under the baton of Yannick Nézet-Seguín, and receiving a rave review in the New York Times.
Gabriela's compositions also reflect her virtuosity as a pianist — when not composing music and words, she is a sought-after performer, specializing in contemporary repertoire. In August of 2025, she performed her dazzling Sonata Serrana No. 1 for four hands with celebrated pianist Jeremy Denk.
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, a meaningful portion of which was donated by Gabriela to the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music. 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 of all demographics and aesthetics.
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 given each year to fifty of the country’s finest artists. Her work has been described as “crafted with unself-conscious mastery” (Washington Post), “brilliantly effective” (New York Times), “a knockout” (Chicago Tribune), “glorious” (Los Angeles Times) and “a magical world premiere” (Wall Street Journal). Gabriela is regularly commissioned by luminaries such as cellist Yo Yo Ma, the King’s Singers, the Cuarteto Latinoamericano with guitarist Manuel Barrueco, and conductors Marin Alsop and Yannick Nézet-Séguin. She has also received orchestral commissions and performances from leading American orchestras including the Chicago Symphony, the Boston Symphony, the Atlanta Symphony, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the San Francisco Symphony. She has held multiple composer residencies with major orchestras, composing Picaflor (Hummingbird): A Future Myth for the Philadelphia Orchestra, Walkabout: Concerto for Orchestra for Detroit Symphony, and Conquest Requiem for the Houston Symphony.
Other recent premieres include Haillí-Serenata for Chicago Symphony under the baton of Andrés Orozco-Estrada; Las Cinco Lunas de Lorca (“The five moons of Lorca”) commissioned by Los Angeles Opera; Apu: Tone Poem for Orchestra commissioned by Carnegie Hall and premiered by the National Youth Orchestra of the United States under the baton of conductor Marin Alsop; Suite Mestiza, a large-scale work for solo violin premiered by Movses Pogossian; and Kachkaniraqmi, for the Takács Quartet.
Co-commissioners San Diego Opera and San Francisco Opera premiered Gabriela’s first opera, El último sueño de Frida y Diego (“The last dream of Frida and Diego”) in the 2022-2023 season, utilizing words by her frequent collaborator Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Nilo Cruz. El último sueño de Frida y Diego, which will be staged by both Chicago Lyric Opera followed by a new production with the Metropolitan Opera in spring of 2026, was described by The New Yorker as revealing “a significant music-theatre talent. Frank has mastered the intricacies of operatic construction on her first attempt, producing a confident, richly imagined score that is free of lapses and longueurs. Let’s hope that more opera commissions come her way.”
Other upcoming projects include a premiere release of the Conquest Requiem with the Nashville Symphony under the baton of Giancarlo Guerrero for the Naxos Records label; a second opera contracted with Nilo Cruz (details forthcoming soon), Frida's Dreams for Brooklyn Rider, and Silent Spring for narrator and string quartet about the environmentalist Rachel Carson for the Pacific String Quartet with actress Sigourney Weaver.
One of the most important artistic relationships in Gabriela’s life is her longtime collaboration with Nilo Cruz. To date, as a composer-librettist team, they have worked on projects as small as an art song and as grand as operas and requiems on iconic, historic subjects, totaling a dozen works with more on the horizon.
Gabriela is the subject of a multitude of doctoral theses, and 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.
In 2023, Riddle Films featured Gabriela in its celebrated documentary “Beethoven’s Nine” with award-winning filmmaker Larry Weinstein on the legacy of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
Civic outreach is an essential part of Gabriela’s work. She has volunteered extensively in hospitals and prisons, with her current focus on enhancing the music program within the Anderson Valley Unified School District, a rural district of modest means with a large Latino population in Boonville, CA.
Gabriela is also a climate activist, co-authoring articles on climate action within the music industry for Chamber Music America Magazine and creating a Climate Commitment for GLFCAM. She has also written about her hearing loss as a guest columnist with the New York Times, “I think Beethoven encoded his deafness in his music.”
In 2017, Gabriela founded the award-winning Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music whose history and mission can be found here. A two-time recipient of the Mellon Foundation’s three-year grant for $600,000, Gabriela has personally mentored nearly a hundred emerging composers at GLFCAM to date, many of whom are significant artists today, and reached hundreds of other music students in GLFCAM’s Distance Learning Program. In 2025, GLFCAM announced a partnership with the University of Pacific (Stockton, CA), officially designated as a Hispanic-serving institution, in order to establish the Inclusive Music Initiative; GLFCAM’s principles would become a meaningful part of student curriculum at Pacific’s Conservatory of Music, California’s oldest music conservatory, bringing in GLFCAM composers and performers as guest teachers.
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 Music Composition (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 is a member of Wise Music/G. Schirmer’s prestigious roster of artists, exclusively managed and published.
