© Ksenia Yanko
Michaela Rea Catranis is a composer, pianist, and interdisciplinary artist based in Berlin, Germany. "Mysterious, cosmic expanses" (KlassikFestival) — her music is at once familiar and otherworldly, inviting listeners into immersive soundworlds that spin out in a colorful exchange of artistic discipline and tradition. “I'm interested in art that activates our senses, that intensifies the human experience as a whole, drawing us out of the everyday and deeply into the moment. It becomes impossible to look away. We lose ourselves in that space with the artist, with the audience, and what is happening there.”
Born into a family of eleven in eastern Pennsylvania, she began playing piano at age four, discovering music as a place of imagination and play. From the sound of the piano, to the joyous tumult of her family life and her mom’s record player, music filled the home. They later moved to the Middle East and Africa where she had the opportunity to work with local musicians, an experience which has continued to guide her work.
“Music is much more than a means of expression. It is is a way of coming together - a creative act of interdependence, and staying near to things we have lost, or want to be nearer to.” She seeks connection across artistic and social boundaries, bringing together music, art, technology, and dance into a communal ritual that reflects our shared humanity — a thirst for togetherness rooted in her experience of growing up in a large family, and the encounters with varied musical and cultural environments through her formative years.
Michaela studied at the Peabody Conservatory and the Hanns Eisler School of Music. She is the recipient of the TONALi Composition Prize and has received commissions and support from Ensemble Modern, Bang On A Can, Fondation Royaumont, Zafraan Ensemble, Mivos Quartet and Riot Ensemble, among others. Her work has been presented at venues including the Elbphilharmonie, Berliner Philharmonie, Wigmore Hall, Roulette in New York and MassMoca. She was recently awarded a MacDowell Fellowship (2027) for developing her multimedia song cycle, Becoming Earth, and the Berlin Research Scholarship for New Music (2026). In 2018, she founded MENAJIRI, an interdisciplinary collective dedicated to immersive, collaborative performance rooted in sustainability and hybrid artistic practice. Since becoming a mother in 2022, themes of vulnerability, care, and the complexities of healing have moved to center of her work.
“Savor sound & savor life.” Pauline Oliveros
"Conducted by Miguel Pérez Iñesta, this exquisitely refined piece combines compositional vitality with a poetic listening experience.” - Michèle Tosi, ResMusica
"Jeita" by Michaela Rea Catranis, emerged...as something like a musical allegory of the cave, an earthly meditation as a sonorous, moving narration of a single, lonely voice. The immense "TONALi" festival in the Elbphilharmonie ended with such a courageous appeal to the inner world." - Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich, Edition Faust-Kultur
"I write about our humanness, our connection to each other and the world around us, both natural and digital worlds. It could be like Laughter or a Prayer, or maybe a Shadow, muscles and sinew rippling, a Kiss. The movements of Love, trembling, electric, or a Scream, life tearing through the flesh of a Mother, a tiny heart beating, new against her chest, both of them still dripping from her wound, washed in blood. The Body, charged up with Soul, spirit-stuff and the ecstasy of the moment. Being. It is all this, a Polyphony of human experience, so brief, sensuous, writhing, soft, dirty, naked, full of rage, of joy, of tenderness. It's a courageous smile and then some silence too. It is how I talk to you, with moonbeams in my eyes; a conversation between lovers." ~ m.r.c.