Photography: Ann Marsden
2026 COMPOSER-IN-RESIDENCE
LIBBY LARSEN
LunART is thrilled to announce a Grammy award-winning American composer, Libby Larsen, as LunART Festival’s 2026 Composer-in-Residence! In addition to featuring her instrumental works at the LunART Festival 2026 Gala concerts, Larsen will conduct the LunART 2026 Composers Hub, a professional development program for emerging composers. Chen will mentor participants to develop practical skills to express their creative ideas, cultivate relationships with performers, and master the art of collaboration through a series of masterclasses, workshops, private lessons, and lectures.
Learn more about the COMPOSERS HUB 2026
Bio
Libby Larsen (b. 1950, Wilmington, Delaware) is one of America’s most performed living composers. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2024), she has composed over 500 works including orchestra, opera, vocal and chamber music, symphonic winds, and band. Her work is widely recorded. An advocate for the music and musicians of our time, in 1973 Larsen co-founded the Minnesota Composers Forum, now the American Composer’s Forum. Grammy Award winner and former holder of the Papamarkou Chair at John W. Kluge Center of the Library of Congress, Larsen has also held residencies with the Minnesota Orchestra, the Charlotte Symphony, and the Colorado Symphony. From 2014-2020 as, Artistic Director of the John Duffy Institute for New Opera, she guided a faculty of practicing professional artists in nurturing and production of new opera by American Composers. Larsen’s 2017 biography, Libby Larsen: Composing an American Life, by Denise Von Glahn, is available from the University of Illinois Press.
Photography: Ann Marsden
“Music exists in an infinity of sound. I think of all music as existing in the substance of the air itself. It is the composer’s task to order and make sense of sound, in time and space, to communicate something about being alive through music.”