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 most recent releases are The City Sleeps (a solo guitar album of Irish tunes) and Everything Again Is New (an album of algorithmic electronic music and music written for the sextet yMusic).

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

As a composer, Sanna has received commissions from Brooklyn Rider, The Knights, Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra, Palaver Strings, Beta Collide, and soprano Danielle Birrittella. 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 is featured in 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.

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

Kyle Sanna has arranged music for Béla Fleck, Jan Vogler, Anne-Sofie Von Otter, The Amsterdam Sinfonietta, and for Yo-Yo Ma on two Grammy Award-winning albums. In 2025 his arrangements were performed at Carnegie Hall by The Knights and in Dublin by Martin Hayes and the Irish National Symphony Orchestra. His arrangements 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, with whom he performs every month at the renowned Brooklyn venue Barbès. 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 lives in Brooklyn, New York where he hosts the Summercamp Concert Series for out-of-town musicians.