Prestini's 2024-25 season features a staggering five world premieres of major opera and music-theater works across the United States. In September 2024, her chamber opera Silent Light will open the 10th Anniversary Season of National Sawdust, the groundbreaking new music venue which Prestini Co-Founded, and which is one of the few major New York cultural institutions led by women. With a libretto by Royce Vavrek and direction by Thaddeus Strassberger, the piece delves into the complex moral dilemmas faced by members of a Mennonite community as they grapple with forbidden love and the limitations of restrictive society, and performances will feature conductor Christopher Rountree leading Trinity Choir and NOVUS ensemble, with singers Anthony Dean Griffey, Daniel Okulitch, and Brittany Renee. In early 2025, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and VisionIntoArt will co-present the world premiere of Primero Sueño, a site-specific processional opera taking place at The Met Cloisters that explores the life of proto-feminist Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. Co-composed with Magos Herrera, who will also star as Sor Juana de la Cruz, the production will feature the German vocal ensemble Sjaella, with stage direction by Louisa Proske. Prestini's expansive, multi-modal opera Sensorium Ex will have its world premiere May 22-25 presented by the Common Senses Festival in Omaha, Nebraska, in a co-presentation by VisionIntoArt and Beth Morrison Projects. With a libretto by poet Brenda Shaughnessy, the dystopian tale centers on a scientist/mother and her non-verbal child, operating at the intersection of AI and disability, while exploring fundamental questions of what it means to have voice. Sensorium Ex is pioneering a new set of Artificial Intelligence tools as a way of expanding the possibilities for voice and expression, developed in collaboration with the The NYU Ability Project that allows people with disordered, impaired, or limited speech to communicate, with an emphasis on expressivity and personalization. The spring and summer of 2025 will see two more world premieres: an immersive choral theater work entitled Port(al) commissioned by Brooklyn Youth Chorus (BYC) in collaboration with Radiolab founder and host Jad Abumrad, as well as multidisciplinary collaborator and director Jessica Grindstaff, which will take place at the Brooklyn Navy Yard’s Agger Fish Building, and the outdoor chamber opera Time Like a Rolling Stream, which features Julian Crouch and Sandbox Percussion and will be presented by Pike Opera in Milford, PA.

Prestini's compositions have been praised by The New York Times as “otherworldly…outright gorgeous" and "music of candid vulnerability," while NPR stated that her work "bursts open in beauty." The Financial Times proclaimed that “New York retains a remarkable cadre of composers, but chief among these is the singular figure of Paola Prestini,” The Wall Street Journal noted “Ms. Prestini is known for pushing the boundaries of classical music through collaborations with poets, filmmakers and conservationists, among others,” and VAN Magazine stated how "like a public square, each Prestini piece is a meeting place across aesthetic, intellectual, and cultural lines." 21CM Magazine simply posed the rhetorical question: “is there any one person who’s doing more to reshape contemporary classical music in America than Paola Prestini?”

Prestini's large-scale multimedia compositions have fundamentally changed the landscape of her art form, from the world's first and largest communal Virtual Reality opera The Hubble Cantata, to the historic performance of her collaborative pandemic project Con Alma, which took place at the United Nations as a statement on the solidarity and resilience of women in the digital age. Her boundary-breaking work Sensorium Ex is the first opera starring a nonverbal lead, and its casting and creative development process, as well as its purpose-built AI technology, are offering a new blueprint for how the performing arts can approach disability and inclusivity.

A tireless advocate for equity across her industry, Prestini has repeatedly shattered the glass ceiling by conceiving and creating programs such as the Hildegard Commission for emerging women and marginalized composers, and the Blueprint Fellowship for emerging composers and women mentors at the Juilliard School. She was also the first woman in the Minnesota Opera’s New Works Initiative with her grand opera Edward Tulane, and was among the 19 leading women composers to participate in the New York Philharmonic's Project 19 — the largest women-only commissioning initiative in history that commemorated American women gaining the right to vote with the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920.

Prestini has been awarded substantial support from the Mellon and Ford Foundations, named as a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow and a Sundance Institute Film Music Program Fellow, and has been composer-in-residence at the Park Avenue Armory, MASS MoCA, and the American Academy of Rome. Prestini is also the co-founder of VisionIntoArt, a non-profit new music and interdisciplinary arts production company in New York City that incubates deep process interdisciplinary and impact works. She attended the Peabody School of Music and is a graduate of the Juilliard School, and she resides in Brooklyn with her husband, the acclaimed cellist Jeffrey Zeigler, and her son, the yo-yo/rubix master, Tommaso.

Their 20th anniversary was marked in the 2022-23 season with The Beethoven Project, a multi-faceted initiative which includes performances of the complete cycle of Beethoven’s string quartets; the commissioning of six composers to write encores inspired by Beethoven’s quartets; the creation of a new video library spotlighting each Beethoven quartet; and bringing Beethoven’s music to non-traditional venues around the Quartet’s home base of Boston, including homeless shelters and youth programs.

The Quartet is committed to working with composers of today — recent commissions include works by Augusta Read Thomas, Felipe Lara, Jaehyuck Choi, and Zosha di Castri. Celebrating the process of creation, the Quartet recorded three new commissions by Kate Soper, Oscar Bettison, and Vijay Iyer as part of Miller Theatre’s Mission: Commission podcast.

Additionally, the Quartet regularly collaborates with a diverse range of artists, which have included pianists Menahem Pressler, Orion Weiss, Shai Wosner, Billy Childs, and Vijay Iyer; members of the Silk Road Ensemble; clarinetist and composer Jörg Widmann; clarinetists Anthony McGill and Charles Neidich; flutist Claire Chase; and violist Kim Kashkashian, featured on their recent Dvořák recording. The Quartet also continues to be a strong supporter of Kashkashian’s project Music for Food, participating in concerts throughout the United States for the benefit of various food banks and shelters.

Recording projects continue to be an important facet of the Quartet’s artistic output. Described by Gramophone Magazine as a ”string quartet defined by virtuosity so agile that it’s indistinguishable from the process of emotional expression,” their newest release for ECM Records features Dvořák's Viola Quintet as well as György Kurtág's Six Moments Musicaux and Officium breve in memoriam. The Strad also declared the album as “nothing short of astonishing.” Under the auspices of the Monte Carlo Festival Printemps des Arts, they recorded a disc of three Beethoven quartets, of which Diapason “admired the group’s fearlessness, exceptional control, and attention to detail.” The Quartet can also be heard playing Mendelssohn on Nimbus Records, Bartók on Zig-Zag Territoires, and the complete Ligeti Quartets on Naxos, for which they won a Grammy Award for Best Chamber Music Performance.

The members of the Parker Quartet serve as Professors of the Practice and Blodgett Artists-in-Residence at Harvard University’s Department of Music. The Quartet also holds a visiting residency at the University of South Carolina and spends its summers on faculty at the Banff Centre’s Evolution: Quartet program. For the 23-24 season they will be involved in a visiting residency at the Walnut Hill School for the Arts, in Natick, MA, working with gifted high school musicians. 

Founded and currently based in Boston, the Parker Quartet’s numerous honors include winning the Concert Artists Guild Competition, the Grand Prix and Mozart Prize at France’s Bordeaux International String Quartet Competition, and Chamber Music America’s prestigious Cleveland Quartet Award.

Following his tenure with Kronos, his multifaceted career has led to collaborations with a wide array of artists and innovators such as Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, Hauschka, Vijay Iyer, Robin Coste Lewis, Yo-Yo Ma, Julie Mehretu, Siddhartha Mukherjee, Carl Hancock Rux, Foday Musa Suso, and Tanya Tagaq. He has also performed as a soloist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Toronto Symphony, the Royal Danish Radio Symphony, the New Century Chamber Orchestra and the Ulster Orchestra under the batons of Peter Oundjian, JoAnn Falletta, Dennis Russell Davies and Dmitry Sitkovetsky. Recent and upcoming concertos written for him include Mark Adamo’s Last Year (at Carnegie Hall with the American Composers Orchestra), Andy Akiho’s Cello Concerto (Sun Valley Music Festival and the Oregon Symphony) and Amy Brandon’s Simulacra (Open Waters Festival).

Mr. Zeigler has released 40 solo and chamber music recordings for Nonesuch Records, Deutsche Grammophon, Cantaloupe, Smithsonian Folkways and National Sawdust Tracks and has appeared with Norah Jones on her album Not Too Late on Blue Note Records. Zeigler can be heard on the film soundtrack for Paolo Sorrentino’s Academy Award winning film, La Grande Bellezza, as well as Clint Mansell’s Golden Globe nominated soundtrack to the Darren Aronofsky film, The Fountain. Zeigler can also be seen making an on screen cameo in Season 4 of the Amazon Prime’s Golden Globe Award winning series Mozart in the Jungle.

His most recent solo album, Houses of Zodiac, is his first full collaboration with his wife, trailblazing composer Paola Prestini. Strings Magazine described the album as “one of the greatest and most ambitious solo cello albums of all time”. It is a multimedia experience that combines spoken word, movement, music, and imagery into a unified exploration of love, loss, trauma and healing. Filmed by Murat Eyüboglu at MASS MoCA and Studio Polygons in Tokyo, Japan, with premieres at The Broad Museum in Los Angeles and the RomaEuropa Festival in Italy. The live and filmic experience features the performances and original choreography of New York City Ballet soloist Georgina Pazcoguin and star Butoh dancer Dai Matsuoka from Sankai Juku featuring the poetry of Anaïs Nin, Pablo Neruda, Brenda Shaughnessy, and Natasha Trethewey.

Other upcoming highlights include being featured in a new cello opera entitled The Old Man and the Sea directed by Karmina Silec with music by Paola Prestini and libretto by Royce Vavrek. The world premier will take place at Arizona State University in Fall 2023 and then go on to the University of North Carolina, New York and Los Angeles.

Zeigler was the Music Director for two eco-documentaries that exist at the intersection of art, science, and community. Directed by Murat Eyüboglu, part one was entitled The Colorado and premiered at the Metropolitan Museum, the Kennedy Center, and Stanford Live and at over 30 film festivals. An excerpt of Part two, The Amazon, was presented at the Margaret Mead Festival at the American Museum of Natural History.