Luna Pearl Woolf works “at the pinnacle of a new generation of politically conscious and artistically progressive composers” (Primephonic). Her music, praised by The New York Times for its “psychological nuances and emotional depth,” has been heard widely across North America and Europe. Throughout diverse collaborations with authors, filmmakers, and dancers, Woolf’s music is characterized by its penetrating focus on music’s capacity as a storytelling language. 

Woolf is particularly renowned in the field of opera and vocal music. Tapestry Opera premiered her Jacqueline, about legendary cellist Jacqueline du Pré (with a libretto by Royce Vavrek) in February 2020. The production garnered five nominations and a win in Toronto’s prestigious Dora Awards; Opera Going Toronto called it “a brilliant, wrenching chamber work … a profoundly moving opera, one that shreds the emotions.” Après moi, le déluge, Woolf’s post-Katrina lament for cello and choir, has been performed more than a dozen times across the US and Canada, including in New Orleans and at Carnegie Hall. The New York Times called Après moi “blazingly ardent and softly haunting,” and Strings magazine described it as “sorrowful, deeply political, and aching with universal regret.” In 2016, The Washington National Opera commissioned and presented Woolf’s Better Gods for its American Opera Initiative. Awarded one of Opera America’s inaugural Discovery Grants for female composers in 2014, Woolf developed her opera The Pillar with librettist David Van Taylor; a meditation on loyalty, corruption and the nature of love as seen through the Madoff family story, which The Washington Post described as “splendid” and “wrenching, realistic theater.” 

Woolf’s discography includes the composer-portrait album LUNA PEARL WOOLF: Fire and Flood, released in January 2020 on the PENTATONE Oxingale Series. The album comprises 25 years of vocal works performed by the Choir of Trinity Wall Street, cellist Matt Haimovitz, and others, conducted by Julian Wachner. New York Times contributor Corinna Da Fonseca-Wollheim comments, “Woolf trains a zoom lens on the collective experience, sometimes plunging us right into the midst of destruction and anarchy only to pull back, in one swoop, to a clear-eyed plane of compassion.” Other recent releases include Angel Heart, a music storybook narrated by Jeremy Irons, alongside a new German-language edition with author Cornelia Funke narrating. 

Woolf founded the groundbreaking Oxingale Records with Matt Haimovitz in 2000, garnering multiple GRAMMY, INDIE and JUNO awards and nominations. In 2010 she launched Oxingale Music to publish works by award-winning contemporary composers. Born and raised in Western Massachusetts, Luna Pearl Woolf graduated summa cum laudefrom Harvard University, and has studied at Smith and Amherst Colleges and Oberlin Conservatory. She lives with her family in Montreal, Canada.