Kala Pierson is an American composer and media artist based in New York. She was a 2005-06 Artist in Residence at Tribeca Performing Arts Center and one of the 2002-03 composers in the Composers and the Voice series at American Opera Projects.
Pierson's recent commissions have been from the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (U.K.), for the audio component of a permanent interactive exhibit in the Naughton Gallery in Belfast, Ireland, and from Composers Collaborative (New York) for a new work in the Non Sequitur Festival. Her music has been performed by Cantate Chamber Singers (as the first place winner of Cantate's composition competition), Baltimore Choral Arts Society's Young Composers Project, Season Quartet, and Nurse Kaya Sextet. Her media work has been exhibited at the Seattle Center on Contemporary Art, BetaSpace, Halcyon and other venues. Her audio engineering credits include recordings on Nonesuch (Steve Reich's Music For Large Ensemble) and Cantaloupe Records.
From 2003 to 2005, Pierson served part-time on the faculty of Fordham University in New York. She also co-founded and co-directs Summer in Sombor, an innovative composition seminar held each year in northern Serbia. She has read papers at musicology conferences in the U.S. and Germany. In August 2009, her audio/media installation series Singing Stones will travel in Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands.
Born 1977 in Baltimore, Maryland, Pierson studied at Eastman School of Music (with Joseph Schwantner, Augusta Read Thomas, Robert Morris and David Liptak); Bard College at Simon's Rock; Tanglewood Institute (BUTI); and Baltimore's magnet high school for the arts, where she was a voice major. At Eastman, she played in the Balinese gamelan; sang in the Eastman Chorale; co-founded Ossia, Eastman's student-run new music collective; and, along with fellow students Gavin Chuck and Alan Pierson (no relation), co-founded the new music group Alarm Will Sound. Pierson is also self-trained in Persian traditional music, and her long-term project Axis of Beauty combines music and media with texts by Middle Eastern artists, journalists and everyday citizens, in an ongoing response to her government's "Axis of Evil" propaganda.