By exploring the merging of music and visuals, Argentinian composer Carolina Heredia’s current research is focused on the production of interactive audiovisual works. A 2015 Fromm Commission recipient, her compositions have been commissioned and performed in the United States and South America by several esteemed musicians and ensembles, including JACK Quartet, Derek Bermel, Alarm Will Sound, Aspen Contemporary Ensemble, Duo Cortona, Alex Fiterstein, Tesla Quartet, Chiara Quartet, and Khemia Ensemble. Her music has been featured at the SONIC Festival NYC, Aspen Music Festival and School, Bowling Green New Music Festival, the Mizzou International Composers Festival, SEAMUS, Strange Beautiful Music, New Music Gathering, Crested Butte Music Festival, Bowdoin Music Festival, and the TIES Toronto International Electroacoustic Festival, among others. Her work Virgina (2015), for solo alto and mixed choir, was awarded the Brehm Prize in choral composition, premiered by the University of Michigan Chamber Choir under the baton of Jerry Blackstone, and is currently published by the Hal Leonard company. Ius in Bello (2014), for clarinet and string quartet, will be released this year on a record by Alexander Fiterstein and the Tesla Quartet on Orchid Classics.

Carolina Heredia moved to the United States in 2009, when she was 28 years old, to pursue graduate education in music composition. She had received a Licenciature in Music Composition from the National University of Villa Maria (Córdoba, Argentina) and graduated from the Violin program at the Córdoba State Conservatory of Music. Before coming to the States, she had also worked as a violinist, arranger, producer, and composer for the Metropolitan Orchestra of Córdoba and was an active part of the popular music scene, performing violin with and recording for several traditional and progressive tango, folk, and rock bands. In 2017, Carolina completed her Doctorate in Music Composition at the University of Michigan, studying with Michael Daugherty, Evan Chambers, Erik Santos, and Kristin Kuster. She was then a 2017-18 postdoctoral fellow at the University of Missouri School of Music. Starting in the Fall of 2018, she will begin her appointment as Assistant Professor in Music Composition and Assistant Director of the Mizzou New Music Initiative at the University of Missouri, Columbia.

Heredia’s 2015 Harvard University Fromm Music Foundation Commission supported the creation of her work Ausencias/Ausências/Absences, for string quartet and fixed media, which was premiered by the JACK Quartet in March, 2016. Later that year, she was awarded a one-year fellowship at the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities to further develop and extend the work into an intermedia collaboration by adding dance and interactive video and extending its length from seventeen to thirty minutes. Heredia collaborated with Costa Rican choreographer Sandra Torijano and Interactive Video Engineer Carlos Garcia, as well as the the technical team at the Duderstadt Center, including staging, lighting, and sound. The artistic impetus for this work were the final writings of Violeta Parra, Alfonsina Storni, and Ana C. Cesar, three South American poets who took their own lives. In this work, she explores the concept of suicide as an attempt to exercise a capacity for empathy and compassion as well as to destigmatize mental illness. 

Heredia founded Khemia Ensemble in 2015 as a contemporary music ensemble that strives to create innovative audiovisual concert experiences involving interactive technology. The ensemble has presented at several venues across the Americas, including National Sawdust (NYC), Trinosophes (Detroit), Radio Nacional and Facultad de Musica (Argentina), and Facultad de Artes (Colombia). Khemia has received support from the Foundation for the Contemporary Arts, the Eastman School of Music Paul R. Judy Center for Innovation and Research, the University of Michigan, and the Mizzou New Music Initiative.