About Susie Ibarra
Susie Ibarra is a Pulitzer Prize-winning Filipinx-American composer, percussionist, and sound artist. Her interdisciplinary practice includes composition, performance, mobile sound-mapping applications, multichannel audio installations, recording, and documentary.
Susie Ibarra is a Yamaha, Zildjian, and Vic Firth Drum Artist.
She is the founder of Susie Ibarra Studio and, with artist-musician and engineer Jake Landau, co-founded the label and publisher Habitat Sounds.
She works to support Indigenous and traditional music cultures, like musika katutubo from the Philippines, advocates for the stewardship of glaciers and freshwaters, and supports initiatives in addressing water and desert climate, and women and girls education with Joudour Sahara, Morocco.
Ibarra leads several ensembles including Talking Gong Trio with Claire Chase and Alex Peh. She has recorded over 40 albums and performed in events and venues such as Carnegie Hall; the Olympics; and the Sharjah Biennial.
Her book Rhythm in Nature: An Ecology of Rhythm was released in March, 2024.
Recent honors include a 2025 Pulitzer Prize in music, 2025 Creative Capital Artist Award, 2025, Callie’s Studio Residency in Berlin, 2024-2025 DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program fellowship, for which she is based in Berlin, and 2024 Charles Ives Fellowship with the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She is a Foundation for Contemporary Arts 2022 Music Fellow, United States Artists 2019 Music Fellow, TED Senior Fellow 2014, and National Geographic Explorers Storyteller 2020.
Her new work , Commissioned by MaerzMusic 2025 Berlinerfestspiele and co produced by DAAD , is CHAN: Sonnets and Devotions in the Wilderness comprises six kundimans by Filipinx-American composer, percussionist and sound artist Susie Ibarra. The kundiman is a genre of traditional Filipino love song, in this case an expression of Ibarra’s love for nature, dedicated to landscapes that are dear to her after having lived or spent time near them: the migrating beech trees of the medieval forests of Germany; the Warsaw-Berlin ice-marginal spillway; Lake Tsongmo, a sacred glacial lake in the Himalayan Mountains of North Sikkim, India; and the Pasig River along the Manila Bay in Luzon. Historically, this river in her homeland was culturally important as a source of water and a route for travel. Despite the fact that it was declared biologically dead in 1990 after decades of industrial development, more recently it has seen a revival, with various species of fish, birds and trees flourishing once again.
For CHAN – which is the artist’s middle name, meaning “meditation” – Ibarra worked with poets Don Mee Choi and Logan February, with whom she shared a residency as part of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program. Their words complement the six sonnets and devotions composed for ensemble, voice, speaker trees and baroque pipe organ. 6 Kundimans for ensemble, voice, speaker trees, poets and baroque pipe organ (2024)
Her new work, Sky Islands 2024, of which she won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2025, was commissioned and had its world premiere in Asia Society New York, also commissioned by Fromm Music Foundation, and NYSCA AWAW Environmental Artist. It will have its West Coast premiere in June 2025 at the Ojai Music Festival.
Sky Islands takes inspiration from the musical traditions of Luzon’s sky islands and represents the Montane Forest Ecosystem through a performative sonic installation. The piece explores Ibarra’s percussion sound language in extended techniques for all players, featuring Philippine Northern style interlocking rhythms and melodies found in bamboo and gong and flute music of the Kalinga and Cordilleras Region in Luzon. Sky Islands is a musical call to action, highlighting Luzon’s rainforests—an endangered region with 31 endemic species, including the Philippine Eagle, and a region that has both volcanic and non-volcanic mountains amidst diverse fauna—with the aim of connecting people to our fragile and beautiful ecosystems and draw awareness to changing climate and global community practices. “Sky islands” are distinct ecosystems at high altitude ranges, known for becoming hotspots for biodiversity and unusual forms of life. Geographically isolated with few or no outside predators, sky islands are home to many species of small mammals that don’t exist anywhere else in the world, making them wondrous areas where we can see evolution “sped up”.
Susie Ibarra was intrigued by the “sky islands” on the mountain tops of rainforests in her home region of Luzon, Philippines, home to the world's largest number of unique mammal species. Ibarra has spent time researching, listening to, and recording in different landscapes, both on land and in water. The physicality of being in nature has influenced her composing and performance and enabled her to capture, through sound and sculpture, the beautiful and somewhat magical existence of sky islands. With a focus on connecting us to our biodiverse habitats, Ibarra’s Sky Islands draws sonic inspiration from the broadleaf forest ecoregion of northern Philippines’ Luzon. The piece is composed for Ibarra’s eight-piece music ensemble, including the Extended Talking Gong Ensemble with Claire Chase on flute, Alex Peh on piano and Levi Lorenzo and Susie Ibarra on percussion, joined by the four-member Bergamot Quartet. Sky Islands combines the creation of new gong metal sculptures, which create a physical floating garden series of sounds, with a musical score to float the composition of Sky Islands onto the stage with the performers.
Her ongoing work, Water Rhythms: Listening to Climate Change (2020) began as a collaboration with glaciologist, geographer, and climate scientist Dr. Michele Koppes, which maps water rhythms from source to sink. Ibarra’s composition is derived from field recordings of five global watersheds, including the Greenland ice sheet and glacier-fed rivers of the Himalayas. Water Rhythms is an acoustic story of human entanglements with a changing climate and landscape. The premiere of Water Rhythms was presented by Fine Acts Foundation and TED at Jack Poole Plaza, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada and Innisfree Gardens, Millbrook, NY (2020). It has also been shown at The Countdown Summit, Edinburgh, Scotland (2021); as part of Nothing Makes Itself at the ARKO Art Center, Seoul, Korea (2021); and as a multi-channel sound installation at Fridman Gallery, Beacon, NY (2021) and the San Francisco Exploratorium (2022). Ibarra will return to the Himalayas spring 2024 to record Indian Glaciers and out to the coastal Atlantic Ocean areas of Rhode Island this year to set a climate installation and listening room for Newport Art Museum 2025.
Ibarra’s piece Fragility Etudes was a commissioned film by Asia Society Triennial 2021 We Do Not Dream Alone. These compositions are rhythmic studies for solos and ensemble which reflects humanity’s interdependence. Ibarra explores conduction, polyrhythms and concepts from the physics of glass. Fragility Etudes was filmed in residency and premiered at MASSMoCA in live performance 2021. The film is directed by collaborating multimedia artist Yuka C. Honda. September 2022 Ibarra conducted multi-ensemble Fragility Etudes in Zamane Festival Morocco. She was commissioned for a new work for percussion in which she created RITWAL solo percussion Susie Ibarra, for the UNDRUM Festival produced by Architek Percussion and Suoni Per Il Popolo 2021 for video which premiered in June 2021.
As a producer, Ibarra collaborates with Splice to create sound packs based in environmental sounds, traditional musical cultures, and her own extended percussion language. Sounds of the Drâa Valley Morocco is a sound pack featuring six traditional ensembles and soloists from South Saharan Morocco (2022). Ibarra has also collaborated with composer and bassist Richard Reed Parry on two sound packs and a new album of compositions focused on breath cycles and heart beats, Heart and Breath: Rhythm and Tone Fields (OFFAIR Records, 2022).