Composer Prize 2026
Kitty Xiao
Biography
Kitty Xiao is an Australian composer and electronic artist living in New York. Her work is inspired by the social landscape and its influence on the body through movement, language and production. Her compositions range from solo, small to large ensemble acoustic and electroacoustic works, collaborations with choreographers and film makers, and performance and production of electronics. In her music she investigates timbral gesture, corporeal experience and reimagines space, often exploring relations between artificial and human structures to discover narratives that may arise through multiple dimensions of perception.
Her music has been performed by Ensemble Modern, Mivos Quartet, The Callithumpian Consort, Ensemble Apex, Australian National Academy of Music, Switch~ Ensemble, OSSIA New Music, line upon line percussion, Transient Canvas, Syzygy Ensemble, Elysium Dance, Brighton Fashion Week, and has appeared at the cresc…Biennale for Contemporary Music, International Conference on Technologies for Music Notation and Representation, Melbourne Festival, Adelaide Festival, Apex Festival, The ANAM Set Festival, amongst others.
She has released music with Clan Analogue and Move Records, and she is represented by the Australian Music Centre. She has attended workshops including the International Ensemble Modern Academy, Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt and SICPP. She is recipient of the 2022 APRA Professional Development Award, 2021 Sounds Australia Export Stimulus Program, and received the 2020 Belle S. Gitelman Award, 2019 Howard Hanson Large Ensemble Prize from The Eastman School of Music, and was an Alfred Kitchin scholar at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance.
Kitty holds a Master of Music Performance from Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, Master of Music Education from The University of Melbourne, Master of Music Composition at The Eastman School of Music, and is currently a doctoral candidate in Music Composition at Columbia University. Her composition mentors include George Lewis, Georg Friedrich Haas, Zosha Di Castri, Brad Garton, Seth Cluett, Robert Morris, David Liptak, Oliver Schneller, and Anthony Lyons.