about

Carolyn Yarnell is an internationally acclaimed composer, visual artist, and writer whose work transcends traditional boundaries, uniting music, painting, and multimedia into deeply immersive artistic experiences. Renowned for her evocative and visionary voice, she explores themes of nature, spirituality, the cosmos, and the human spirit, creating works that resonate on both intimate and universal scales.

She is the recipient of some of the most prestigious honors in the arts, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize, and a Fulbright Fellowship to Iceland. Uniquely, Yarnell has been awarded dual Individual Artist Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in both Music Composition and Oil Painting—an extraordinary recognition of her multidisciplinary mastery. Her groundbreaking contributions have also been honored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters with the Charles Ives Scholarship, and she has held residencies at leading institutions such as MacDowell, Yaddo, Tanglewood, Banff, Aspen, and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, among many others.

A graduate of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and Yale University, Yarnell has built a body of work spanning orchestral, chamber, choral, and solo compositions, alongside electronic and ambient soundscapes. Her music has been performed by leading ensembles and musicians across the United States, Europe, and Asia, reflecting both a deep reverence for classical traditions and a fearless embrace of contemporary experimentation. Among her many commissions and residencies, she served as MUSICALIVE Composer-in-Residence with conductor David Alan Miller and the Albany Symphony, a three-year national program of the League of American Orchestras and Meet the Composer.

Beyond composition, Yarnell is an accomplished visual artist and curator. Her paintings often intertwine with her musical creations, producing strikingly synesthetic narratives that invite audiences into transformative spaces where sound and sight converge. From 2016 to 2018, she served as Exhibitions Director at the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, curating innovative shows such as Rome Revisited, Music for Your Eyes, and The Time Returns, a tribute to Egyptian artist Ashraf ElHady. She has also collaborated extensively with celebrated visual artist Joyce Kozloff and exhibits regularly in California and New York.

Yarnell is a founding member of the Common Sense Composers’ Collective, a San Francisco/New York-based group dedicated to creating and championing new music. Her career is distinguished not only by the breadth of her achievements but also by the depth of her vision—bringing together sound, image, and word in works that offer profound meditations on the natural world and the human condition.

With every project, Carolyn Yarnell expands the possibilities of artistic expression. Her work stands as a testament to the power of creativity to inspire, challenge, and transform.