ABOUT

Sorana Santos is an Ivors British Composer Award–nominated composer, songwriter, performer, and writer whose work explores the intersection of music and language. Her output integrates improvisation, sound design, and process-based techniques across concert, media, and literary contexts. Central to her practice is the relationship between words and sound and how musical and linguistic structures can inform one another. Her project Our Lady of Stars / Books of Hours - a combined album, audiobook, and book - exemplifies this hybrid approach to form and structural focus across mediums.

Published by Warner and recognised with an industry award for innovation in sound design, her music has been broadcast internationally and commissioned by organisations including the BBC, Tate Modern, ORA Singers, the Rose Theatre Southbank, and the Millennium Commission.

Sorana has collaborated with ensembles and performers such as the Ligeti Quartet, Juice Vocal Ensemble, and improvisers James Maddren, Conor Chaplin, and Alex Bonney. Her work has been performed at the Royal Albert Hall, Southbank Centre, Oxford Contemporary Music, and Glasgow Jazz Festival. She also creates and contributes to bespoke commissions for computer games, apps, documentaries, film, and audiobooks. Her writing, originally published by Lazy Gramophone Press, evolved into interdisciplinary projects integrating text, visual art, and sound.

For two decades she has developed composition and creative study programmes that nurtured Grammy and MOBO Award–winning artists and many national and international names. She has lectured for the University of Oxford, Royal Holloway, and Trinity College, and mentored emerging composers for the AEC–ECSA Alliance (co-funded by the European Commission) and ORA Singers. She also serves as musical director for artists represented by Red Light Management and Sony.

Sorana studied composition with Diana Burrell at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and completed her PhD under Brian Lock and Nina Whiteman at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her work has received significant creative and academic funding, most recently supporting ethnographic research in the United States.

Outside of her professional life, Sorana is an amateur photographer and can be found taking photographs and rollerskating on the river.