Joanne S. Na is a multicultural composer who brings together the cultural traditions of the East and West through her music. Her output encompasses a diverse range of works including vocal music, instrumental solo and chamber works, and orchestral music. She endeavors to create music that evokes human emotions, experiences, and places, and to share positive energy and hope through her music.
Recently, her piece Juice of Dreams for saxophone quartet won the 2021 National Association for Music Education Student Composers Competition. In 2020, she received the 1st Seoul Grand Philharmonic Orchestra Next Generation Composer Award for her orchestral work Hide and Seek, and it was performed by SGPO at the Youngsan Art Hall, South Korea in June, 2020. She was a finalist for both the 2022 & 2021 ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Awards and the 68th BMI Student Composers Award (2020), and a semi-finalist for the NYC Contemporary Music Symposium 2021 Call for Scores and the Walter Hussey Composition Competition (2020). Her works were selected for the Nan Schwartz Composition Workshop at the University of Oregon (2021), Composers of Oregon Chamber Orchestra Call for Scores (2020), and Hwaum Project Academy Call for Scores (2019, South Korea).
Her compositions have been performed by Grammy-winning soprano Estelí Gomez, Grammy-winning cellist Arlen Hlusko, soprano Arwen Myers, Kenari Quartet, Delgani String Quartet, 4X5 Piano Duo, Helix! New Music Ensemble, Hwaum Chamber Orchestra, UO Symphony Orchestra, and Seoul Grand Philharmonic Orchestra, among others.
She holds a Master's of Music from the University of Oregon and received summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Music from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. Her primary teachers are Robert Kyr, David Crumb, and Scott Ordway. At the University of Oregon, she was a member of the Oregon Composers Forum and an administrative coordinator of the Oregon Bach Festival Composers Symposium and the Music Today Festival. She also taught undergraduate composition courses as a Graduate Teaching Fellow. In the 2020-21 academic year, she was awarded the Composition Area's Outstanding Graduate Scholar Award.