Biography
Ellen Reid composes and designs sound across opera, choral repertoire, film, and installation contexts. Recognition expanded during the 2010s as she scored multiple films while receiving commissions from each of Los Angeles’s four principal musical organizations. Her debut opera, p r i s m, earned the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2019.
Born in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in 1983, Reid played piano and sang in a church choir as a child, later performing percussion in her high-school ensemble. Music remained an extracurricular pursuit until she enrolled at Columbia University in New York, arriving days before the September 11, 2001 attacks. Initially majoring in music, she changed course after a faculty member urged her to write rather than analyze; she subsequently created a musical adaptation of Dead Poets Society and completed her BFA. An MFA from the California Institute of the Arts followed, after which she established a bi-coastal practice between New York and Los Angeles.
Her catalog spans chamber pieces, choral settings, operas, and other theatrical works, many conceived for specific sites or visual-art contexts. Early film scores include The Midnight Swim (2014) and Buster’s Mal Heart (2016), both directed by Sarah Adina Smith. Larger-scale vocal projects brought wider local attention; among them, the 2018 choral work dreams of the new world—created with librettist Sarah LaBrie for the Los Angeles Master Chorale—examined three eras of American experience: Black prosperity in 1890s Memphis, the 1970s Houston oil boom, and contemporary space exploration viewed from Los Angeles. Reid remains the sole composer, regardless of gender, to have been commissioned by all four major Los Angeles institutions—the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Master Chorale, the Los Angeles Opera, and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, where she began a three-year term as creative advisor in 2019.
The 2019 opera p r i s m, centered on the psychological aftermath of sexual assault, received the Pulitzer Prize for Music. That year she also collaborated with Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller on a sound installation for Walt Disney Concert Hall. Together with composer Missy Mazzoli, Reid founded Luna Composition Lab, a mentorship program serving self-identified female, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming composers.
Born in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in 1983, Reid played piano and sang in a church choir as a child, later performing percussion in her high-school ensemble. Music remained an extracurricular pursuit until she enrolled at Columbia University in New York, arriving days before the September 11, 2001 attacks. Initially majoring in music, she changed course after a faculty member urged her to write rather than analyze; she subsequently created a musical adaptation of Dead Poets Society and completed her BFA. An MFA from the California Institute of the Arts followed, after which she established a bi-coastal practice between New York and Los Angeles.
Her catalog spans chamber pieces, choral settings, operas, and other theatrical works, many conceived for specific sites or visual-art contexts. Early film scores include The Midnight Swim (2014) and Buster’s Mal Heart (2016), both directed by Sarah Adina Smith. Larger-scale vocal projects brought wider local attention; among them, the 2018 choral work dreams of the new world—created with librettist Sarah LaBrie for the Los Angeles Master Chorale—examined three eras of American experience: Black prosperity in 1890s Memphis, the 1970s Houston oil boom, and contemporary space exploration viewed from Los Angeles. Reid remains the sole composer, regardless of gender, to have been commissioned by all four major Los Angeles institutions—the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Master Chorale, the Los Angeles Opera, and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, where she began a three-year term as creative advisor in 2019.
The 2019 opera p r i s m, centered on the psychological aftermath of sexual assault, received the Pulitzer Prize for Music. That year she also collaborated with Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller on a sound installation for Walt Disney Concert Hall. Together with composer Missy Mazzoli, Reid founded Luna Composition Lab, a mentorship program serving self-identified female, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming composers.
Albums
Singles
