Finola Merivale is an Irish composer of acoustic and electro-acoustic music living in New York. She completed her DMA in Composition at Columbia University in 2023, where she studied with George Lewis, Georg Friedrich Haas and Zosha Di Castri. Her music has been performed internationally and featured at festivals such as the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival and the Contemporary Music Festival of Buenos Aires. Her works have been played by International Contemporary Ensemble, Talea Ensemble, PRISM Saxophone Quartet, Crash Ensemble and musicians of the Chicago and St. Louis Symphony Orchestras, amongst others.
Recent accolades include a 2024 fellowship at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, a music bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland to support an evening-length work for NYC-based ensemble W4RP and the Charles S. Miller Prize for Distinction in Composition at Columbia University. In 2022, Finola’s debut portrait album, Tús – a collaboration with Desdemona – was released on New Focus Recordings. The National Concert Hall and Sounding the Feminists’ Music Recording Award funded the production of the album. In 2021, Finola and her creative team were the winners of the 2021 Fedora Digital Prize, an award to assist in the production of As an nGnách/Out of the Ordinary, a community opera in virtual reality which was commissioned by Irish National Opera.
Upcoming releases of her work include des os in collaboration with Catherine Sikora, and Falling Flames in collaboration with Isabel Lepanto Gleicher and Jessie Cox.
