Recipient of an Ivors 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. From 2023/24 her Nightwriter Series (Malpas, Vienne, Finisterre), also saw Sorana introduce photography into her muso-linguistic work, released under her own I Dream Sound imprint with distribution from The Orchard.

Her portfolio includes commissions from The BBC, Tate Modern, ORA Singers, The Rose Theatre Southbank, [former] Millennium Commission, Bath International Festival, work with The Ligeti Quartet, Juice Vocal Ensemble, leading improvisers James Maddren, Conor Chaplin, and Alex Bonney, and performances in venes such as The Royal Albert Hall, Southbank Centre, Oxford Contemporary Music, and Glasgow Jazz Festival. Published by Warner, her media and commercial work is regularly broadcast internationally across the Sky and BBC networks, and has received an industry award for innovation in sound design. Academically, Sorana has received circa £100k in creative and academic grants, most recently completing an ethnographic research tour of the US.

Owing to the success of her design and delivery of courses in creative studies at The Guildhall’s Centre for Young Musicians where she fostered many national and international names, and Grammy and MOBO winners in composition, songwriting, production, and creative writing over the course of two decades, Sorana was invited to lecture at Oxford University, where she taught from 2013-2020. She currently mentors at the AEC-ECSA Alliance (co-funded by the European Commission) and ORA Singers, and is a musical director for artists at Sony and Red Light Management.

Sorana grew up in London studying piano and ‘cello while attending Tiffin Girls’ School, 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. Her free time finds her rollerskating and taking photographs of water on the canal.