Arlene Sierra

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Arlene Sierra (born Miami, 1970) is an American-born composer working in the United Kingdom.

She studied at Oberlin College, Yale University and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, receiving a DMA in 1999; among her principal teachers were Jacob Druckman and Martin Bresnick. A composition fellow at Tanglewood and the Britten-Pears School (Aldeburgh Festival) in 2000 and 2001, her teachers there included Louis Andriessen and Oliver Knussen.

Her music has been commissioned by organizations including the Tanglewood Music Festival, the Albany Symphony, the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and the Jerome and PRS Foundations. Performers of her work have included the American Composers Orchestra, the London Sinfonietta, the New Music Players, Psappha, Chroma, the Schubert Ensemble, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, and the Tokyo Philharmonic. In 2001, she was the first woman to win the prestigious Takemitsu Prize; in 2007 she received a Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters with a citation for music, "by turns, urgent, poetic, evocative and witty."

Sierra was a Composition Tutor at Cambridge University before her appointment as Lecturer in Composition at Cardiff University School of Music in 2004. She currently lives in London and is married to British composer Kenneth Hesketh.

Her music is published by Cecilian Music (ASCAP). Works include Aquilo for orchestra, Ballistae, Cicada Shell and Surrounded Ground for chamber ensembles, Hand mit Ringen and Neruda Settings for soprano and ensemble, Streets and Rivers for baritone and piano, Truel for piano trio, a piano duo of Risk and Memory, and a solo piano album Birds and Insects.