The work of interdisciplinary composer-performer Maya Miro Johnson researches body|politics: the intersection of public and private health in cyborg spaces like the screen, the instrument, and her own body. As a feminist, disabled futurist, she seeks to create resonances formed of complex, multimedia networks of intermingled questions that articulate, provoke, and heal experiences and conundrums both universal and unique.

Graduating from the Curtis Institute of Music with the Charles Miller Prize/Alfredo Cassella Award for Composition (B.M. ‘24), where she studied with Nick DiBerardino, Jonathan Bailey Holland, Amy Beth Kirsten, David Ludwig, and Steve Mackey, and also trained in dance, theater, and video art, she has created for artists including Ensemble Intercontemporain, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Sarasota Festival, loadbang, Rock School of Ballet, Barnes Foundation, Cincinnati May Festival, UC Davis, Moab Music Festival, De Orkest Ereprijs, Baltic Sea Festival, Tanglewood Music Center, & Copland House (CULTIVATE). Semi-finalist in BMP’s 2021 Next Gen competition, runner-up in the 2024 Élan Awards, honorable mention in 2024 NYYS First Music commissions, and winner of both 2020 BMI Schuman and Surinach Prizes (a historical first), she appears on HOCKET’s #What2020LooksLike, Johnny Gandelsman’s This is America, Inna Faliks’ Manuscripts Don’t Burn, Katelyn Bouska’s Hildegard and Her Sisters, and the Marin Alsop documentary, The Conductor. She served as a cover conductor for the Minnesota Orchestra in 2022, including BIS Records’ Mahler Symphony No. 8 with Osmo Vänska.

Summers have been spent at Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music (composition), Bergen International Festival (composition), Aspen Music Festival (conducting), soundSCAPE (both), and Tanglewood (composition). Born in Salt Lake City in 2001, Maya had her first composition lessons in high school with Devin Maxwell and through Luna Composition Lab, also pursuing private study with Chaya Czernowin at Harvard. She is now working towards her M.M. at the Yale School of Music, studying with Katherine Balch, Martin Bresnick, Aaron Jay Kernis, David Lang, and Christopher Theofanidis.

She formed the performance art duo ~ [pronounced two] with Sarrah Bushara in 2020 and is published in the BabelScores Catalog, an online library based in Paris. Her favorite song is Rock’n’Roll Suicide by David Bowie, and in her pain-free spare time she studies Gaga, a movement language by choreographer Ohad Naharin.

Symbols she uses to represent herself are the sunflower, the zebra, the bee, the שׂ, and any shade of purple.