Suzanne Farrin is a composer whose works have been performed around the world. Anthony Tommasini of The New York Times called her first opera, dolce la morte, a work of “shattering honesty.” Her debut recording, Corpo di Terra, was described in TimeOut Chicago, as “like field recordings from inside the cerebral cortex.” Farrin's second opera, Macabéa, is commissioned by the Talea Ensemble with support from the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation, and will have its staged premiere at the Theatro São Pedro in São Paulo, Brazil in 2028, along with a musical premiere at Miller Theatre at Columbia University in 2026.
Recent commissions include works for The New York Philharmonic, the Library of Congress, Sō Percussion, JACK Quartet, and the International Contemporary Ensemble. Her most recent commission is a new work for The Parker Quartet in honor of György Kurtág that premiered at TIME:SPANS 2026. Farrin’s arrangement of Variation 31 was part of the New York Philharmonic’s Eroica and The People United… program conducted by Gustavo Dudamel in March 2026. She is one of a group of composers setting the original work by Rzewski whose sensibility reflects the “dynamism of the American musical landscape.”
In addition to composing, Farrin is a performer of the ondes Martenot, an early electronic instrument created by the engineer Maurice Martenot in the 1920s as a response to the simultaneous destruction and technological advances of WWI. She has performed in film scores such as Chicuarotes (Gael García Bernal, director), Sade Ma’bar/Blockage (Mohsen Gharaie, director), and USERS (Natalia Almada, director), which was featured at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival. She appears as herself in an episode of the Amazon series Mozart in the Jungle (Roman Coppola, director). She recently performed Messiaen’s Trois petites liturgies de la présence divine with the Parlando Orchestra.
A 2018 Rome Prize Winner and a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow in Composition, Farrin is the Frayda B. Lindemann Chair of Music at Hunter College and The Graduate Center, CUNY, where she is the Director of the Ph.D. Program in Composition. She is currently a Visiting Professor at Columbia University. She holds a doctorate from Yale University.
