Soosan Lolavar

Soosan Lolavar is a British-Iranian composer and educator who works in both electronic and acoustic sound, and across the genres of concert music, contemporary dance, installation, film, animation and theatre.

Her work has been performed at venues such as the Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall, V&A, National Maritime Museum, ICA, Chisenhale Gallery, LSE New Academic Building, Blackheath Concert Halls, Jacqueline Du Pré Music Centre, Bonnie Bird Theatre, Circus Space and broadcast several times on BBC Radio 3. She has worked with ensembles such as the Philharmonia Orchestra, the London Philharmonic Orchestra Foyle Future Firsts, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the London Sinfonietta.

In 2015, her work Protect Me From What I Want was performed by members of the London Sinfonietta, and she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study Iranian music at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. In 2014, she had works performed at the V&A and Royal Festival Hall and a short film on her work featured on the BBC in the UK and Iran. In 2013 she was selected as one of two Embedded composers in residence at the Southbank Centre and received funding from Arts Council England, Jerwood Charitable Foundation and Iran Heritage Foundation to pursue ‘Stay Close’, a ten-month project exploring contemporary classical music as a means of cultural exchange between the UK and Iran. In 2012 she won the John Halford Prize for Composition awarded by Ian Pace and was selected as part of the Adopt a Composer scheme funded by PRS for Music Foundation and run by Making Music, in partnership with Sound and Music and BBC Radio 3.

She holds degrees in Social and Political Sciences (University of Cambridge), Musicology (University of Oxford) and Composition (Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance) and her research interests include the politics of gender and sexuality, post-colonialism and the music industry and postmodernism in electronic musics. She has worked as an Assistant Lecturer at Trinity Laban Conservatoire, leading a course on music, gender and sexuality and at City Lit Adult Education college where she teaches classes on music and opera appreciation, modernism, film music and music gender and sexuality.