ABOUT

Sorana Santos is a composer, performer, writer, and researcher working at the intersection of jazz, songwriting, and contemporary music. Her work brings together live performance, narrative, and analysis to create concept-led projects that explore music and meaning across time, memory, and lived experience.

Working between concert, lecture, and storytelling, she creates hybrid performances and multimedia works that blur disciplines. Her projects draw on sources as varied as the Great American Songbook, contemporary classical music, experimental practices, and activist scenes, weaving them into works that move fluidly between the personal and the analytical.

Recent work includes Roads to Then, a lecture-performance inspired by Hejira, developed following her recreation of the 4,200-mile road trip on which the album was written. Combining original music, text, and lived experience, the work traces themes of travel, authorship, and memory through a fragmented, time-layered performance. (See Projects page for more.)

Recognised for her music’s “fresh originality and power” Sorana was nominated for an Ivors Award in Jazz Composition and is published by Warner Chappell Music. Alongside her independent work and commissions for concert work from organisations such as the Tate Modern, Bath International Festival, and Millennium Commission, she composes and develops bespoke music, sound, and performance projects across media and live contexts, with work connected to major international companies including Disney, Sony, and Universal Music Group. She also works as a musical director for artists associated with Sony Music and Red Light Management, and mentors for the European Composer and Songwriter Alliance and Association Européenne des Conservatoiresprogramme, co-funded by the European Commission, supporting emerging composers and songwriters across Europe, and bridging the worlds of composition, performance, and artist development.

She has performed at venues and festivals including the Royal Albert Hall, Southbank Centre, Oxford Contemporary Music, Town Hall Symphony Hall Birmingham, and the London and Glasgow Jazz Festivals. Her collaborators include the Ligeti Quartet and Juice Vocal Ensemble, as well as leading jazz musicians such as James Maddren, Conor Chaplin, and Alex Bonney.

Alongside her artistic work, Sorana has an extensive academic background. She is a former lecturer at University of Oxford, holds a BMus from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and a PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London. Over two decades, she designed and developed creative practice education at the Guildhall School’s Centre for Young Musicians, fostering artists who have gone on to achieve national and international recognition, including MOBO and Grammy award winners.

Alongside this, Sorana develops a parallel practice in abstract photography, informed by ideas of time, memory, and simultaneity. This visual work echoes her musical language, and extends her exploration of narrative and perception.