Nell Shaw Cohen

Nell Shaw Cohen (b. 1988) evokes landscapes, visual art, and the lives of mavericks in her lyrical works for concert and stage. Sauntering Songs, a 75-minute live album of Cohen’s choral and vocal works commissioned and recorded by Skylark Vocal Ensemble, featuring performances by Juventas New Music Ensemble, was released in 2023. She has also received commissions from Houston Grand Opera, Boston Choral Ensemble, soprano Laura Strickling, and Montage Music Society, among others.

Previously Artist-in-Residence with Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Cohen has received an OPERA America Commissioning Grant for Women Composers, Jack Kent Cooke Foundation Graduate Arts Award, and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich Prize from the International Alliance for Women in Music. Her operas have had workshops with Fort Worth Opera, American Opera Projects, New Dramatists, New York University, Untitled Theater Company No. 61, the Harwood Museum of Art, University of Texas at San Antonio, and University of New Mexico, and she was first runner-up for the 2020 Zepick Modern Opera Competition.

Cohen earned degrees in composition from NYU and New England Conservatory, where her teachers included Herschel Garfein and Michael Gandolfi. As Founder & Director of Landscape Music (LandscapeMusic.org), an international network of composers and performers, she advocates for music inspired by landscape, nature, and place. She lives in the Shawangunk Mountains of New York's Hudson Valley.