Gabriela Ortiz

Composer

Latin Grammy nominee Gabriela Ortiz is one of the foremost composers in Mexico today and one of the most vibrant musicians emerging on the international scene.

Her musical language achieves an extraordinary and expressive synthesis of tradition and the avant-garde, combining high art and folk and popular music in novel, frequently refined, and always personal ways.

Ortiz has written music for dance, theater, and cinema, and has actively collaborated with poets, playwrights, and historians. Her creative process focuses on the connections between gender issues, social justice, environmental concerns, and the burden of racism, as well as the phenomenon of multiculturality caused by globalization, technological development, and mass migrations.

Although based in Mexico, she has had music commissioned and performed by orchestras around the globe. World premieres in 2023 include Revolución Diamantina, a ballet commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Altar de Bronce, a trumpet concerto dedicated to Pacho Flores and commissioned by the Liverpool Philharmonic, Orquesta de Galicia, New World Symphony, San Diego Symphony, and Orquesta Sinfónica de Minería.

Two musicians in a concert hall, one conductor with baton and another violinist playing amid an orchestra. — Gabriela Ortiz and María Dueñas on tour with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Ortiz has been honored with the National Prize for Arts and Literature (the most important award for writers and artists given by the government of Mexico), the Gold Medal Award given by the Mexican Institute of Fine Arts, the Bellagio Center Residency Program, a Civitella Ranieri Artistic Residency, a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, and a Fulbright Fellowship, among other distinctions.

In 2016, Ortiz was inducted into the Mexican Academy of Arts. In 2022, she became a member of the prestigious Colegio Nacional, an honorary society created to gather together Mexico’s most distinguished artists, writers, scientists, and philosophers.

In 2022, Ortiz was selected as curator of the Pan-American Music Initiative, launched by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel in 2021. She also has been named to the Richard and Barbara Debs Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall for its 2024/25 season.

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