About
Carolina Heredia (b. 1981) is a composer and intermedia artist whose music treats sound as inseparable from gesture, space, body, and memory, spanning acoustic chamber and large ensemble works, live electronics, and multimedia with dance, video, poetry, and interactive technology. Her practice emerges from a life lived between worlds — moving across languages, cultures, disciplines, and ways of knowing, and dwelling in the space between them — shaped by her path from conservatory violin training, folk music, improvisation, and tango in Argentina into electroacoustic and multimedia composition in the United States. Fanfare’s Colin Clarke wrote that her “voice is most definitely one to search out, to follow … there is a vast imagination at work here.”
Heredia has collaborated with musicians and ensembles including the JACK Quartet, Alarm Will Sound, the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Ensemble, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Duo Cortona, and clarinetist Derek Bermel. In 2015, she co-founded Khemia Ensemble, which has performed across the United States, Argentina, and Colombia; she was also a co-founder of ANTiCX, a collective of women multimedia artists.
Her string quartet Ausencias/Ausências/Absences (2015), a Fromm Music Foundation Commission, draws on the final writings of poets Violeta Parra, Alfonsina Storni, and Ana Cristina Cesar. Premiered by the JACK Quartet, it won the inaugural John Corigliano Grand Prize (2018) and the Lake George Music Festival Composition Competition (2019), and later became an intermedia work with choreographer Sandra Torijano and video engineer Carlos García. Other highlights are pruning (2021), for Duo Axis; Julio 20’ (2023), for SATB choir and chamber ensemble, commissioned by the Sphinx Organization for its vocal ensemble Exigence, conducted by Eugene Rogers, with text by Myriam Gurba; and Resonancia Natural (2025), for wind trio, electronics, and video, created with visual artist Heather Bird Harris.
Her music has been presented at venues and festivals such as Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, National Sawdust, the Aspen Music Festival, and the Strange Beautiful Music Festival. Recordings are available on Orchid Classics, Neuma, Ravello, and Albany Records. Déjate Caer, on James Lyon’s album Turning, has been called “haunting, dreamlike and intensely absorbing” (JW Vibe), and cellist Serafim Smigelskiy praised the “soulfulness and visceral power” of Ius in Bello, recorded with clarinetist Alexander Fiterstein and the Tesla Quartet.
She has received commissions from the Fromm Music Foundation, the Barlow Endowment, and the Missouri Music Teachers Association, as well as the John Corigliano International Prize and the Brehm Prize in Choral Composition, among other honors. A first-generation college graduate, she holds a D.M.A. in Music Composition from the University of Michigan and a Licenciatura in Music Composition from the National University of Villa María, Argentina. She previously served as Assistant Professor of Music Composition and Associate Director of the Mizzou New Music Initiative at the University of Missouri, where she became the first Latin American faculty member in the School of Music and the first woman faculty member in the Composition Department, and as Director of Programs at the American Composers Forum.