Biography

Elizabeth Younan (1994) is quickly gaining a reputation as one of Australia’s finest young composers. Her violin solo, …your heart dreams of spring is featured on Jennifer Koh’s 2022 GRAMMY award-winning album, Alone Together. Elizabeth is a Sydney Symphony Orchestra “50 Fanfares Project” composer, the composer for the podcast “Lost Women of Science” (produced in partnership with PRX and Scientific American), and has her piece, The Fertile Crescent—inspired by her Lebanese heritage—commissioned, recorded, and broadcast by ABC Classic. Elizabeth was a featured Australian composer of Musica Viva Australia’s International Concert Seasons (2018, 2020), and has composed for principal players of the Philadelphia Orchestra for their “Our City, Your Orchestra” series.

Elizabeth is currently the Composer-in-Residence at Santa Sabina College (class of 2011), and the Back to Bach Project, where she is also the Regional Director of Australia’s first branch in Sydney. She was the Composer-In-Residence for the Chamber Music Festival of Lexington, Kentucky, and has been privileged to work with many eminent musicians such as Joyce Yang, the Chen Family String Quartet, Ensemble Offspring, Nathan Cole, Arcadia Winds, Croissants & Whiskey, Stefanie Farrands, and the Goldner String Quartet, among many others. Accolades include a Daniel W. Dietrich II Young Alumni Fund Award from the Curtis Institute of Music, an ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award, the Layton Emerging Fellowship Composer Award, the Kendall National Violin Competition’s Watermark Composition Prize, two Willgoss Prize Commissions in association with USYD and UNSW, the 102.5 Fine Music and Willoughby Symphony Young Composer Award, and the Jean Bogan Youth Prize.

Elizabeth holds a Bachelor of Music in Composition with First Class Honours (2015) and a Master of Music (2018) from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, where she studied with Carl Vine AO. She was awarded the Ignaz Friedman Memorial Prize, a research grant from the Australia Council for her Honours thesis, and the Australian Postgraduate Award (2016-2018). Elizabeth graduated from her composition studies at the renowned Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia (2021), which all students attend on full scholarship. She graduated with the Charles Miller “Alfredo Casella” Award for excellence in composition and was selected by staff and faculty to be the female graduating speaker for the class of 2021. She studied with Dr. Jennifer Higdon, Dr. David Serkin Ludwig, Dr. Richard Danielpour, and Dr. Amy Beth Kirsten as the first Australian composer to be admitted to Curtis in its nearly 100-year history. Elizabeth was recently awarded a prestigious 2024 Australian Universities’ John Monash Scholarship from the General Sir John Monash Foundation, which provides postgraduate scholarships to outstanding Australians to study overseas. Elizabeth will be pursuing her Doctor of Musical Arts at New York’s famed Juilliard School in 2024 on full-tuition scholarship as a C.V. Starr Doctoral Fellow.

Other . . .
Other musical endeavours include playing the piano. Elizabeth is also an avid chorister, having sung soprano with Gondwana Choirs, the Choir of Christ Church St. Laurence, and The Sydney Conservatorium of Music Chamber Choir. Elizabeth loves to read, and is currently reading Woolf, Stein, and Goldsworthy. Elizabeth also loves listening to her family converse in fluent Arabic and eating her mum’s delicious Lebanese food.