Department of Music

Judith Shatin is a composer, sound artist and community arts partner, whose music, called ‘something magical’ by Fanfare, draws on expanded instrumental palettes and a cornucopia of the sounding world, from machines in a coal mine, to the calls of animals, the shuttle of a wooden loom, a lawnmower racing up the Lawn. Timbral exploration, cross-boundary acoustic and digital media, and dynamic narrative design are fundamental to her music. A Clay Fellow of the Humanities (2015), Shatin was educated at Douglass College (AB, Phi Beta Kappa), The Juilliard School (MM) and Princeton University (MFA, PhD). She is William R. Kenan Jr. Professor at UVA, where she founded Virginia Center for Computer Music, and has received the Outstanding Teacher of the Year Award from the University’s Z Society.

Her courses range from Songwriting and Computer Music to seminars on topics such as Parsing the Electroacoustic. Her music has been commissioned by organizations including the Barlow Endowment and Fromm Foundation, Carnegie Hall, the Library of Congress, Ensemble Berlin PianoPercussion, Kronos Quartet, the National Symphony and many others. She has received four NEA Composer Fellowships as well as grants from the American Music Center, Lila Acheson Wallace-Readers Digest Arts Partners Program, Meet the Composer; and the Virginia Commission for the Arts. Twice a fellow at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio, she has also held residencies at Brahmshaus, La Cité des Arts, MacDowell, Mishkan Omanim, Yaddo and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Festivals where her music has been featured include Aspen, BAM Next Wave, Havanah in Springtime, West Cork, and many others. Also in demand as a master teacher, Shatin has served as senior composer at the Wellesley Composers Conference, Master Artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, featured composer at the Chamber Music Conference of the East, and senior faculty at California Summer Music. Her film collaboration Rotunda, with Robert Arnold, is based on visual and sonic recordings made over the course of an entire year. An excerpt may be viewed here.