Finola Merivale

Lecturer in Music

Finola Merivale is an Irish composer of acoustic and electro-acoustic music, living in New York. She is a DMA candidate in Composition at Columbia University, where she is studying with George Lewis, Georg Friedrich Haas and Zosha Di Castri. Her music has been performed internationally and featured at festivals such as Huddersfield, the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival and the Contemporary Music Festival of Buenos Aires. Her works have been played by International Contemporary Ensemble, Talea Ensemble, Crash Ensemble, and musicians of the Chicago and St. Louis Symphony Orchestras, amongst others.

She was recently named the winner of the National Concert Hall and Sounding the Feminists’ Music Recording Award in Ireland – a grant that will fund the release of her debut album. She is currently working on Out of the Ordinary – the world’s first community opera in virtual reality – commissioned by Irish National Opera. It won the 2021 Fedora Digital Prize. In 2020, she was a winner of the inaugural National Sawdust New Works Commission Competition, and was awarded a four-month residency at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris. She has recently been commissioned by Rebekah Heller and the West Cork Chamber Music Festival.

Columbia Degrees: 
DMA, Composition
2023