BIO

BIOGRAPHY

Kyle Sanna has been active as a composer, producer, guitarist, and improviser in New York City since 2000. His music has been performed across the globe – at the Bach House in Eisenach, Germany, the Royal Opera House in Muscat, Oman, Sydney’s ABC studios, Carnegie Hall, and points between. Kyle has collaborated with and performed alongside many of today’s virtuosos (Yo-Yo Ma, Edgar Meyer, Chris Thile), with some of the greatest living interpreters of Irish music (Kevin Burke, Martin Hayes, Seamus Egan), and with improvisers worldwide. He has given workshops at the Montana State Women’s Prison, at an orphanage in Juárez, Mexico, and at numerous universities and festivals from Alaska to Cuba.

As a composer, Kyle writes for both live performance and fixed media, at times creating a video component for the works. He has received commissions from Beta Collide, Brooklyn Rider, the Knights, and flutist Alex Sopp. Kyle participated as both composer and performer in Carnegie Hall’s Porous Borders of Music Workshop with bass virtuoso Edgar Meyer. He is a Meet the Composer grant recipient and was a Finalist in the Turner Classic Movies’ Young Film Composers Competition. His “ruminative and shape-shifting” (San Francisco Chronicle) work for string quartet, Sequence for Minor White, won First Prize in the 2018 Charlotte New Music Festival Composition Competition. WNYC’s New Sounds and Sound Check host John Schaefer called his music “unconventionally beautiful”. His first video work, “LULLABY”, made him a Finalist in Texas A&M University’s Fresh Minds Festival.

Kyle Sanna has arranged music for orchestra and soloist (for banjo pioneer Bela Fleck and cellist Jan Vogler), for string quartet (for Swedish mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie Von Otter and for Irish fiddler Martin Hayes), and for cellist Yo-Yo Ma on two Grammy Award-winning albums: 2010’s “Songs of Joy and Peace” and 2016’s “Sing Me Home” with the Silk Road Ensemble. His arrangements have appeared on The Colbert Report, NPR’s Performance Today, and on the Sony Classical, Sony Masterworks, and Naïve labels.

In addition to his composing and arranging, Kyle Sanna is an active improviser on guitar, synths, and samplers, performing solo and collaborating with instrumentalists, instrument designers, dancers, and theater companies.

Kyle studied jazz at the University of Oregon and composition at the Université Lumière Lyon II in France. He lives in Brooklyn and is a member of Kinan Azmeh’s CityBand, Peter Apfelbaum’s Sparkler, Marika Hughes & Bottom Heavy, The Seamus Egan Project, Ground Patrol, We the Gleaners, and a duo with violinist Dana Lyn.