Hailed by The New Yorker as a “first-rate, versatile musician”, guitarist Kyle Sanna’s diverse musical practice includes composition, improvisation, the recording studio, live coding, and the traditional music of Ireland.

Sanna's compositions have been performed at Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie, the Royal Opera House in Oman, Sydney’s ABC studios, the National Recital Hall in Taipei, New York’s Carnegie Hall, and many points between. His latest release, Everything Again Is New, includes a composition for the sextet yMusic and algorithmic electronic music using samples from that composition.

"Unconventionally beautiful music" - John Schaefer, WNYC's New Sounds and Soundcheck

Kyle Sanna has received commissions from Brooklyn Rider, The Knights, Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra, Palaver Strings, Beta Collide, soprano Danielle Birrittella, and flutist Alex Sopp. Festival acceptances include the International Symposium on Electronic Art, The Oregon Bach Festival, and Art Basel Miami Beach. 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. His music appears on two films by Ken Burns: “The U.S. and the Holocaust” and the upcoming "The American Revolution". Sanna’s piece for clarinet, percussion, strings, and live electronics, Undone Landscape, was premiered by Kinan Azmeh and The Knights at the Clark Art Institute in 2024. That year also saw the release of Everything Again Is New, an album of algorithmic electronic music and music written for the sextet yMusic.

“[A] first-rate, versatile musician” - The New Yorker

Kyle Sanna has arranged music for Béla Fleck, Jan Vogler, Anne-Sofie Von Otter, Martin Hayes, The Amsterdam Sinfonietta, The Knights, and for Yo-Yo Ma on two Grammy Award-winning albums. His arrangements have been performed by orchestras across the US and in Europe, and have appeared on The Colbert Report, NPR’s Performance Today, and on the Sony Classical, Sony Masterworks, In a Circle, and Naïve labels.

In addition to his composing and arranging, Sanna performs regularly as an improvising guitarist with Kinan Azmeh’s CityBand and Ground Patrol, and performs music based in the Irish tradition with Martin Hayes, Seamus Egan, Maeve Gilchrist, and Dana Lyn. He is equally at home in the recording studio as on the stage, and has produced nine full-length albums by various artists.

Kyle Sanna studied jazz at the University of Oregon and composition at the Université Lumière Lyon II in France. He is a 2024 recipient of the New York State Council for the Arts individual artist grant. He hosts a concert series at his home in Brooklyn, NY.