STEFANIA DE KENESSEY’s music has been performed throughout New York City, from Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center to Joe’s Pub and La Mama; internationally, it has been heard in more than 35 countries, from Australia to Venezuela. Her output ranges from choral, vocal and operatic pieces to chamber and orchestral work, as well as scores for film, theater and dance.
Her Microvids, 19 piano miniatures and accompanying poems written during the pandemic, has been recorded by award-winning pianist Donna Weng Friedman and Broadway star Krystal JoyBrown (Diana Ross in Motown, Eliza in Hamilton, among others).
Two other important arrangements of Microvids have also been premiered and recorded for release by Parma Records in 2025: a duo version for piano and violin, with Grammy-nominated virtuoso Curtis Stewart adding his distinctive, tour-de-force improvisation to the underlying piano part; and a version for piano and orchestra, commissioned and performed by the New Jersey YouthSymphony and its director Helen Cha-Pyo.
De Kenessey is the inaugural Composer-In-Residence for the Dal Sogno Ensemble, which commissioned The Names of Woman(2024), a cantata dedicated to women who have been unjustly neglected by history; the piece premiered at Barge music and was selected as a national finalist by the American Prize for its 2025 Charles Ives Award.
De Kenessey is also the first Composer-In-Residence for the Accord Treble Choir, which commissioned and premiered her Urgent Earth(2024), feminist eco-cantata about the climate change crisis, setting a text by the noted Wiccan poet Annie Finch.
De Kenessey has collaborated regularly with the all-female Ariel Rivka Dance Company and its founding choreographer Ariel Grossman and serves as that company’s Composer-In-Residence. Her numerous commissions have included Unorthodox, an all-time audience inspired by the Netflix series.
Her recent CD In Her Words(2022) features four of these dance pieces and was hailed for offering a “rich stew of pulsations, sounds and stories” (Jazz Weekly); “this is powerful, really powerful music... a fascinating disc defined by a wonderfully human sense of sensitivity and compassion”(Fanfare).
Her Unorthodox Redux (2025) for orchestra, chorus and dancers debuted in Antwerp, Belgium with the Virago Symphonic Orchestra, conducted by Pascale Van Os, the Cantemus Merksem Chorus and Dansstudio Arabesque, choreographed by Andres De Blust-Mommaerts.
Her Menstrual Rosary (2020), a provocative music video commissioned for the launch of the New School’s Gender and Sexuality Studies Institute, has won thirty-three awards at national and international film festivals ranging from San Francisco, Nashville and Portland to London, Paris, Madrid, Milan, Hong Kong and Tokyo, taking the top prize at the Dallas and Vienna Indie Short Festivals.
Her virtuoso solo concerto Spontaneous D-Combustion was recorded by pianist Mary Kathleen Ernst and released by Innova Records on an album of women composers
Her opera The Bonfire of the Vanities (2015) offered a radical reimagining of Tom Wolfe’s classic novel: de Kenessey created a leading role for a Black female defense attorney and updated the story of greed and corruption all the way to the final collapse of the New York Stock Exchange. An opera to some, a music theater piece to others, it has “an appealing and easy-going pop style” (Opera Magazine) yet is “caustically witty” (Financial Times). The video was released by House of Film, with permission from Warner Bros. Entertainment. and can be viewed on Marquee TV; the work is also included in a list of the top operas to be adapted from American novels (Opera Magazine, March 2025).
De Kenessey is committed to helping women composers and musicians achieve parity in an unequal, biased world. She is the founding president of the International Alliance for Women in Music and serves on the board of New York Women Composers.