Diana Rotaru

Diana Rotaru (b. 1981, Bucharest) has written from chamber and orchestral music to chamber opera, multimedia or dance shows and short film soundtracks. Her music explores different expressive directions, such as hypnagogia or pre-oneiric aesthetics, feminine psyche or imaginary folklore. She has also been active as a promoter of new music in Romania, being the artistic director of SonoMania new music ensemble (since 2012) and the main coordinator of the Romanian Music Information Center (CIMRO). 

She is currently teaching composition and music analysis at the National University of Music in Bucharest, where she studied with Ştefan Niculescu and Dan Dediu (2000-2005) and she has a PhD in Composition (with the dissertation The Recent Trance and the Principle of Repetition in New Music, 2012). She also studied with Frédéric Durieux at the Conservatoire National Superieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris (2005-2006). She participated at different summer composition courses such as Acanthes (Metz, 2008), Voix Nouvelles-Royaumont (2002 and 2006), or the International Bartok Seminary (Szombathely, 2003), thus working with Jonathan Harvey, Savatore Sciarrino, Brian Ferneyhough or Michael Jarrell, among others. 

She was a resident at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris (Autumn 2007), on a George Enescu grant from the Romanian Cultural Institute. In April 2011 she was an artist-in-residence at Villa Sträuli, Winterthur (Switzerland), at the invitation of Ensemble TaG, who performed her music in two concerts during that period (Verborgen in einer Muschel/ Hidden Inside a Shell - Theater am Gleis and Meet the Artist: Diana Rotaru - Villa Sträuli). In April-June 2015 she was Artist-in-Residence in Vienna, with a grant offered by the Austrian Federal Chancellery & KulturKontakt Vienna. 

She has won numerous prizes, among which the Romanian Academy’s George Enescu Award (2010), the ISCM-IAMIC Young Composer Award (World Music Days, Vilnius, 2008), the Irino Prize (Japan, 2004) or the George Enescu Prize ex-aequo (Romania, 2003 and 2005). Her works have been commissioned by Ensemble XXI (Dijon), Stockholm Saxophone Quartet, Pärlor för svin, Ernst von Siemens Foundation, Takefu International Music Festival, etc. 

In September 2018 she was invited to be an assistant professor to Toshio Hosokawa at the Takefu International Music Festival in Japan and she held a composition masterclass (through the Erasmus+ program) at the “Nino Rota” Conservatory in Monopoli. 

Website: dianarotaru.net