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, Oman’s Royal Opera House, Sydney’s ABC studios, Taipei’s National Recital Hall, Carnegie Hall, and many 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.

“Unconventionally beautiful” is how WNYC’s New Sounds and Sound Check host John Schaefer described his music. 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. Kyle Sanna participated as both composer and performer in Carnegie Hall’s Porous Borders of Music Workshop with bassist Edgar Meyer. He is a Meet the Composer grant recipient and was a Finalist in the Turner Classic Movies’ Young Film Composers Competition. His first video-and-sound work, “LULLABY”, made him a Finalist in Texas A&M University’s Fresh Minds Festival. Kyle has received commissions from Beta Collide, Brooklyn Rider, the Knights, and yMusic.

Kyle Sanna has arranged music for orchestra and soloist (for banjo pioneer Bela Fleck and for 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 Silkroad. 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, dancers, and theater companies. Kyle is at home in the recording studio (sometimes literally), and has produced or co-produced eight full-length albums by various artists.

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