American composer and collaborative pianist Evan Fein was born in Cleveland, Ohio and currently resides in New York City, where he serves on the faculty of The Juilliard School. Fein’s music is often influenced by his Scandinavian heritage and his long association with Iceland and Icelandic creative partners, resulting in a body of work with strong connections to the Nordic region that advance the goals of environmental sustainability in the Arctic. His work has been championed by organizations including Musica Sacra, Opéra de Poche, The Albany Symphony, The United Nations Chamber Music Society, Marble City Opera, Five Boroughs Music Festival, Juventas New Music Ensemble, and The New York Choreographic Institute, and has featured prominently in residencies with Seven Hills Chamber Music Festival and Við Djúpið Music Festival. Fein was named winner of the American Prize for Composition in 2022, was awarded the 2014 Palmer Dixon Prize for Outstanding Composition, and is the recipient of honors from the ASCAP Foundation, Boston Metro Opera, and the American Scandinavian Society. He additionally serves as Trustee for Artistic Initiatives for the Oratorio Society of New York.  He is the author of Inner Hearing, a sight singing method book published by Theodore Presser Company in 2020.

Career highlights include serving as Composer-in-Residence (Artiste Associé) for the Paris-based chamber opera troupe Opéra de Poche, a post he held from 2012-2020, and the premiere of his oratorio Deborah by Musica Sacra at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center in 2016 under the direction of Kent Tritle. Also an accomplished collaborative pianist, Fein’s debut album Over/Under created with cellist Luke Severn will be released on the Move Records label in summer 2023.

His first opera, The Raven’s Kiss, based on Icelandic folk stories, was premiered in concert at Juilliard in 2011 was staged at Herðubreið Performing Arts Center in Seyðisfjörður, Iceland. His second, L’Île des sept sœurs, a Southern Gothic tale, was given its premiere in Paris in 2013 by Opéra de Poche.  City of Ashes, which follows the stories of two German women in the days immediately following the fall of Berlin in 1945, was presented by Opéra de Poche in 2015 in Paris and again in Beijing in 2016. 

Evan Fein holds a Doctorate of Musical Arts and a Master of Music from The Juilliard School and a Bachelor of Music from the Cleveland Institute of Music. In addition, he pursued auxiliary studies at the Freie Universität Berlin (FUBiS) and L’École Normale de Musique de Paris (EAMA). His primary teachers included Samuel Adler, Margaret Brouwer, Michel Merlet,  and Gerardo Teissonnière.

His dissertation “The Ghosts of Versailles” by John Corigliano: An Evolutionary Study was completed in 2014. The first comprehensive study of the work commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera for its centennial, it is now available to scholars around the world.