PAOLA PRESTINI was appointed Creative Director of Original Music Workshop "OMW" in January 2012. She is known as the co-founder and "visionary-in-chief" (TimeOut NY) of VisionIntoArt, an interdisciplinary production company that has created over 70 multimedia productions seen worldwide. The New Yorker has called her a "composer-impresario" and The New York Times has said that she is "a human resources alchemist…[and] an inventive composer whose style mixes the ancient and the up-to-date, the folk inspired and the artfully polished…[her music is] radiant, and amorously evocative."

Her works have been performed worldwide, from the Kennedy Center and BAM's Next Wave Festival in the US, to BEMUS in Serbia, Etnafest in Italy, and the Barbican Centre in London. Named by NPR as one of the “Top 100 composers in the World under 40,” she has been commissioned and performed by Carnegie Hall, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, New York City Opera, and the Kronos Quartet in venues and festivals worldwide.

Her current projects include works for the New York Philharmonic's 2014 Biennale, an installation concerto commissioned by the Krannert Center for Maya Beiser and Cornelius Dufallo; the Hubble Cantata commissioned by Bay Chamber Concerts for soprano Jessica Rivera, the International Contemporary Ensemble, and astrophysicist Mario Livio; Oceanic Verses at the Barbican Centre with the BBC Symphony Orchestra; an evening length dance with the Lar Lubovitch Dance Company; and Aging Magician, an opera-theater collaboration with Rinde Eckert, Julian Crouch and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus that is in residence at the Watermill Center and the Park Avenue Armory. She is known for her collaborations, whichhave been lauded by TimeOut NY as “Ingeniously staged concert pieces that gracefully walk the line between opera and performance art”,and has enjoyed years of fruitful collaborations with muses,visual artists, writers and filmmakers. Her residencies include MASS MoCA, the Hermitage Retreat, Sound Res, Ucross Foundation, Sundance Institute, and LMCC Governor’s Island, and she has worked in colleges and in residencies in Italy, Africa, Mexico and Venezuela. She was a 2012 Musical Exchange Fellow for Carnegie Hall as a featured artist, and was a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow.She is passionate about education, having taught from inner city schools in New York, to El Sistema in Venezuela. She is the editor of the New York Philharmonic's Very Young Composer book, and her music is released on Tzadik Records; her writing is published in the Arcana series, by Hips Road. She is a graduate of the Juilliard School, and has studied with Samuel Adler, Robert Beaser and Sir Peter Maxwell Davies.