Ellen Fishman

About Ellen Fishman

Ellen Fishman is a Brooklyn-based composer whose work integrates music, technology, and interdisciplinary collaboration to create immersive experiences that engage audiences through live performance, video, and interactive media.Her compositions have been performed at venues including the DiMenna Center for Classical Music, Mise en Place, Westminster Choir College, the Suzanne Roberts Theater, The Performance Garage, the New Works Forum at Opera America, and the ASU Kerr Cultural Center. Her StringFlo—a composition written for movement and meditation—was performed live in yoga sessions with instructor Tara Culp and the Fairmount String Quintet. Featured on NPR’s Weekend Edition and in Strings Magazine (March/April 2024), StringFlo was released in 2023 following its sold-out live debut. Her string quartet Lark Dances, performed and recorded by the Fairmount String Quartet, was released on streaming platforms in Fall 2022.Fishman’s groundbreaking interactive opera Marie Begins received the Opera America Discovery Grant for Female Composers, supported by the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation. The online pilot, featuring Grammy nominee Lauren Worsham, allows audiences to influence a non-linear storyline through a custom-designed app. It premiered online in 2020 with the Westminster Choir College Opera Theatre.She is currently exploring spatial audio as a compositional medium. Her piece Shards of Memory for piano and spatial audio premiered at the DiMenna Center in 2024, performed by pianist Marilyn Nonken. Fishman is also developing an immersive opera with longtime collaborator and librettist Julia Curcio, continuing to expand her exploration of interactive and spatial sound experiences.In addition to her creative work, Dr. Fishman is an Apple Distinguished Educator and former Director of Arts and New Media at Springside Chestnut Hill Academy (2012–2022). There, she founded the New Media program within the Sands Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership, integrating coding, design, and fabrication into the arts curriculum. She presents nationally on the integration of technology in arts education and on emerging trends in contemporary music composition.Fishman studied composition at San Francisco State University, the University of California, Berkeley, the Peabody Conservatory, and the Conservatoire Américain de Fontainebleau, where she studied with the influential French composer Gérard Grisey. Specialties: Arts Administration, creative technologies, music composition, conducting, and curriculum design.

Experience

1. Apple Distinguished Eduator

   Apple

   Mar 2007 — Present

   Apple Distinguished Educators (ADEs) are part of a global community of education leaders recognized for doing amazing things with Apple technology in and out of the classroom. They explore new ideas, seek new paths, and embrace new opportunities. That includes working with each other — and with Apple — to bring the freshest, most innovative ideas to students everywhere.\"

Education

• University of California, Berkeley

  Master's degree, Music Theory and Composition

• University of California, Berkeley

  MM, Music Composition

  1984 — 1986

• The Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University

  DMA, Music Composition

  1991 — 1995

• San Francisco State University

  BM, Music

  1980 — 1984