Carolyn Yarnell

Carolyn Yarnell, composer and visual artist, expands the realm of classic beauty through sight and sound, finding inspiration in nature and the spectrum of human experience. Raised in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, Yarnell holds degrees from the San Francisco Conservatory and Yale. A recipient of an Individual Artist Fellowship for Music and Oil Painting from the NEA, Yarnell is particularly noted for works which combine visual and musical depictions of landscape and light. She served three years as composer in residence with the Albany Symphony in New York, and two years as exhibitions director at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art. Noted as an orchestral composer, her compositions have been performed in venues from Carnegie Hall to the National Cultural Center of Taiwan. Among Yarnell’s awards are a Fulbright Fellowship to Iceland; the Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, Headlands Center for the Arts, Virginia Center for the Arts, and UCROSS; a Guggenheim; and the Rome Prize. Yarnell’s recent project was songs for Julia Bullock’s History’s Persistent Voice performed by the San Francisco Symphony in 2022.