Recipient of a BASCA British Composer Award nomination for her interdisciplinary album/audiobook/book Our Lady of Stars/Books of Hours, Sorana Santos’s work has been recognised for its “fresh originality and power” and the “flair and imagination inherent in her personality”.

Exploring points of intersection between music and language in a range of styles and media from concert to commercial music, Sorana moves between composing, songwriting, performing, and writing, weaving elements of contemporary, electronic, and improvised music with experiments in written and spoken word to create contemplative and spacious worlds that explore sound, syntax, and symbology. Her use of voice and keyboard instruments such as prepared piano, harpsichord, and harmonium is central to this, as is her creative writing - which between 2006 and 2015 was published by Lazy Gramophone Press.

Sorana has been commissioned by and worked with a wide range of ensembles, organisations, and musicians, such as the The BBC, Tate Modern, ORA Singers, The Rose Theatre Southbank, The [former] Millennium Commission, Bath International Festival, The Ligeti Quartet, and Juice Vocal Ensemble, as well as leading improvisers James Maddren, Conor Chaplin, and Alex Bonney.

Published by Warner, she is regularly broadcast internationally across the Sky and BBC networks, with her portfolio including music, sound, and voice work for audiobooks, film, and games. Her music has been performed in venues such as The Royal Albert Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall, The Southbank Centre, Kings Place, Oxford Contemporary Music, Glasgow Jazz Festival, and Birmingham Jazzlines, and her awards and nominations similarly represent her diverse portfolio to include The Philip Bates Prize, The International Poetry Competition, and an industry award for innovation in sound design. She has received circa £70k in creative and academic grants to tour and produce her work, most recently completing an ethnographic research tour of the US.

With 2023/24 seeing the first stage of the release of her Nightwriter Series (Malpas, Vienne, Finisterre), which sees Sorana introduce photography into her muso-linguistic work, Sorana is due to tour her lecture-performances Roads to Then. This work, originally presented and performed for Poet in the City and Oxford Contemporary Music, explores the symbolic and thematic underpinnings of Joni Mitchell’s Hejira, uncovered during Sorana’s cross-continent recreation of the solo road trip Mitchell is said to have written the album on.

Sorana grew up in London studying piano and ‘cello while attending the esteemed Tiffin Girls’ School and performing on the local music scenes while recording as a pianist, vocalist, and arranger for local independent artists and labels. She holds BMus with academic commendation from the Guildhall School where she studied composition with Diana Burrell, later gaining her PhD at Royal Holloway under the supervision of Brian Lock and Nina Whiteman.

Owing to the success of her design and delivery of courses in creative studies at The Guildhall’s Centre for Young Musicians, where for two decades she fostered many Grammy and MOBO winners and national and international names in composition, songwriting, production, and creative writing, Sorana was invited to lecture on her specialisms at Oxford University where she taught from 2013-2020 alongside other academic roles at Royal Holloway and Trinity College. She currently mentors for the AEC-ECSA Alliance (co-funded by the European Commission) and ORA Singers, sits on the MU’s Music Writers’ Committee, occasionally MD’s independent artists and artists at Red Light Music and Sony, and continues to write and release music on her own imprint, I Dream Sound, which she runs with distribution from The Orchard/Dead Planet Records. Her free time finds her rollerskating and taking photographs of water on the canal.