Camila Agosto

DMA Student in Composition

An avid collaborator, Camila Agosto is an electroacoustic composer and interdisciplinary artist currently based in New York City. Camila seeks to discover intersections of her work with additional artistic fields through partnerships with other musicians, visual artists, choreographers, instrument builders, and creators. Her projects range from acoustic and electroacoustic concert works and orchestral scores to interdisciplinary projects incorporating visual media and dance, and from solo instruments and larger ensembles to fixed media works. Her music is both fully notated and improvisational and often employs extended instrumental techniques, exhibiting a particular emphasis on the exploration of different timbral and textural elements. Within her works, Camila is interested in uncovering the sonic potentialities of acoustic instruments through highlighting and exposing the human element of live performance.

Camila is a recipient of the Fall 2023 Deutsche Bank Fellowship in Music Composition from the American Academy in Berlin and will be featured in a concert premiering new works in Berlin this Fall. Her music has also been featured at venues and festivals in the United States and abroad. In recent projects, Camila has designed and constructed various instruments and performative installation pieces to use in her compositional work. Upcoming projects include Paracusia IV; a continuation of a multi-movement, concert-length program scored for solo saxophone and live electronics co-commissioned with Justin Massey, with a grant awarded from the Canada Council for the Arts, The Memory of Water Vol. 1; a multi-piece project created in collaboration with violist and poet, Martine Thomas, exploring the integration of text, live composition, improvisation, electronics and custom instruments, as well as a new work for small ensemble commissioned by the Bar Harbor Music Festival.

In the summer of 2020, Camila became a certified yoga instructor and created the Meristem Artist Retreat, a virtual space for artists of marginalized genders including women, trans individuals, femme-identifying, and nonbinary folks, to meet a variety of artists across different disciplines while learning holistic and balanced practices to help them sustain a healthy artistic life. Since then, Camila has founded Meristem Artists, an arts community continuing the work of the retreat to support artists of marginalized genders and create a welcoming, supportive, and trustworthy atmosphere in which to connect, learn, share and work. She has also developed and led a wellness workshop series through the Columbia University Computer Music Center and was an invited guest presenter at the Ensemble Evolution 2022 summer sessions led by the International Contemporary Ensemble.

Camila is currently an ABD doctoral candidate at Columbia University in Music Composition. She holds a Master’s degree from the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University and a Bachelors in Music from Montclair State University