Sabrina Pena Young

Award-winning composer Sabrina Peña Young, the daughter of Dominican and Cuban parents, grew up in South Florida during the 1980s. Starting her creative journey as a musician, Young spent her teen years and much of her college life performing in various orchestras, alternative bands, and avant-garde ensembles. While at University of South Florida in Tampa in 2000, Sabrina Peña Young became involved with SYCOM (Systems Complex for the Recording and Performing Arts), an experimental enclave of composers and media artists and abandoned the sticks for technology. She worked with Emmy-winning director Charles Lyman at Atlantic Productions before leaving Tampa to study music technology at Florida International University in Miami, Florida, in 2003.

Over the next several years Young explored media and music, writing music and creating zombie effects for indie B horror films, composing complex electronic media works like World Order #5, composing music for indie films and studying film/video in Miami where she premiered works like A Portrait of Urban Life at Art Basil Miami and Arts Miami before dropping out in 2006 to teach art to homeless children.

Combining her love of music and love of science fiction imagery, in 2011 Young received a New Genre Award from the International Alliance for Women in Music for her futuristic multimedia oratorio Creation. In 2012 Young composed scores for the Rob Cabrera animated short Monica (2012) and Sean Fleck's time-lapse film Americana. Her works continue to enjoyed throughout Europe, Asia, Australia, and the Americas at the Beijing Conservatory, Opera America, Art Basil Miami, the NY International Independent Film Festival, the Holland Animation Film Festival, Turkey's Cinema for Peace, London's Moving Angel Film Festival and countless festivals worldwide.

Wanting to explore film further, Sabrina Peña Young began production on Libertaria: The Virtual Opera, a science fiction machinima opera produced entirely online. In 2013 Libertaria: The Virtual Opera was premiered in Lake Worth, Florida. The following year she gave TEDx Talk on Libertaria, and in 2015 Young's debut novel Libertaria: Genesis was published. Libertaria: Revelation was published in 2016, along with a special Expanded 2 Book set. In 2018 Peña Young Was awarded the Bradley Fradd Fellowship in Composition by the prestigious Cintas Foundation.