About

Aiyana Braun (b. 1997) is a composer whose music reflects a deep fascination with sonic phenomena and the field of psychoacoustics. Her work explores the dynamic interplay between groove-oriented and ametric material, frequently embracing the roles of community and performer agency in shaping musical outcomes. She has received awards and residencies from the BMI Foundation, ASCAP Foundation, American Composers Forum, Copland House, and the NYU Center for Ballet and the Arts. Her music has been featured on NPR’s From the Top, PBS’s On Stage at Curtis, and I Care if You Listen.TV. Her primary mentors include Pulitzer and Grammy-winning composer Jennifer Higdon, Pulitzer Prize finalist and Grammy-winning composer Ted Hearne, and David Serkin Ludwig, Dean of Music at The Juilliard School.

Aiyana made her debut at the Kimmel Center’s Marian Anderson Hall, premiering a composition at the Marian Anderson Awards honoring producer Norman Lear and poet Maya Angelou. Shortly after, she was commissioned at age 15 to write a piece for the New York Philharmonic. Since then, she has worked with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (in a workshop led by John Adams), Berkeley Symphony (as part of a two-year residency mentored by Anna Clyne and made possible through the League of American Orchestras and New Music USA’s Music Alive program), Orkest de Ereprijs (Netherlands), San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, New York Youth Symphony, and others.

She is currently an Adjunct Professor at Westminster Choir College of Rider University, where she designs and teaches asynchronous graduate music theory and music perception courses (Fall 2024: Psychoacoustics; Fall 2025: Analysis of Seminal Works from the Last 15 Years). At Westminster, she also teaches all levels of undergraduate Musicianship—a course integrating Music Theory, Keyboard Harmony, and Ear Training—as well as “Current Trends,” or 20th and 21st Century composition techniques. Previously, she was a Lecturer at California State University, Fullerton, where she designed and taught courses in Composition, Orchestration, Arranging, Music Theory, and Musicianship, in addition to giving private lessons to graduate composition majors.

Aiyana has taught in the New York Philharmonic's Very Young Composers Program (alongside Angélica Negrón and Pulitzer finalist Mary Kouyoumdjian) and at the Curtis Institute of Music’s Young Artist Summer Program. She is an alumna of The Juilliard School’s Pre-College Division where she studied composition under scholarship for four years, and is a graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music (B.M., Full Scholarship), and the University of Southern California (M.M., Full Scholarship and Teaching Assistantship) where she studied composition with Ted Hearne, psychoacoustics with Rome Prize winner and Guggenheim Fellow Nina Young, and music production with Jae Deal (credits include Charli XCX, Snoop Dogg, and Wynton Marsalis). She has participated in lessons or masterclasses with Kaija Saariaho, John Adams, Unsuk Chin, Chen Yi, Libby Larsen, Caroline Shaw, Derek Bermel, Christopher Theofanidis, Anna Clyne, Stephen Stucky, Ian Krouse, Augusta Read Thomas, and others.

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