© Michael Provost

Tania León is a vital new music personality, highly regarded as a composer and conductor and recognized for her accomplishments as an educator and advisor to arts organizations. Her work is, according to the French newspaper Tribune de Genève, "Aboundingly earthy, rhythmic, and embellished by deeply moving nostalgia, [standing] at the crossroads of every musical emotion." Born in Havana, Cuba, León came to the United States in 1967. At the invitation of Arthur Mitchell, she became a founding member and the first musical director of the Dance Theater of Harlem in 1969, establishing the Dance Theater’s music department, music school, and orchestra. She instituted the Brooklyn Philharmonic Community Concert Series in 1978. From 1993 to 1997 she was the New Music Advisor to Kurt Masur and the New York Philharmonic and she served as Latin American Music Advisor to the American Composers Orchestra until 2001. León has received awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the National Endowment for the Arts, Chamber Music America, the Lila Wallace/Reader’s Digest Fund, NYSCA, ASCAP, and Meet the Composer, among others. In 1998 she held the Fromm Residency at the American Academy in Rome; she has also been a resident at Yaddo (supported by a MacArthur Foundation Award), and at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Italy. León was the recipient in 2000 of the Tow Award at Brooklyn College, where she is professor of Music. She received an Honorary Doctorate degree from Colgate University in 1999. She has held master classes at the Hamburg Musikschule in Germany, and has been Visiting Lecturer at Harvard University and Visiting Professor of Composition at Yale University. As the Boston Phoenix called it, León’s music is "…art of the highest order. [It] doesn’t appropriate folk roots so much as radically inspire us to refigure what those roots are."