Laura Jobin-Acosta
COMPOSER • SOPRANO • NEW YORK
"Jobin-Acosta's music bestowed an ease and vivacity...easily accessible" - Washington Post
Laura Jobin-Acosta is a composer and soprano based in New York. She writes from the in-between places she's lived — between languages, between liturgies, between musical worlds.
That search has taken her from Hindustani music to Carnatic music in South India, from Spanish and Latin liturgy to Coptic, from the poetry of the Harlem Renaissance to poems written by girls in a Honduran orphanage.
As both a singer and a composer, Jobin-Acosta writes with an insider's ear for the voice: her performing career informs her compositional choices, and vice versa.
Her work has taken her to the Kennedy Center with Washington National Opera, to Brooklyn's National Sawdust with Beth Morrison Projects, and to Opera America as a Composer-in-Residence. She recently served as Composer-in-Residence with Choral Chameleon, and collaborated with the Grammy-nominated Lorelei Ensemble on premieres across New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Maryland in Winter 2025. This fall, her youth opera The Brementown Musicians — written as Prelude Opera's first commissioned composer — premieres before touring New York City schools. Her opera A Way Forward will be performed by Maryland Opera in spring of 2027 and she has upcoming premieres in the tri-state area with ModernMedieval Voices.
RECENT & NOTABLE WORKS
CHORAL • 30 MIN
Sometimes I Wonder
Chamber oratorio in English and Spanish, setting poems by girls from an orphanage in Honduras. Soprano soloist, SSAATTBB choir, percussion, piano, guitar, cello.
Commissioned by Choral Chameleon, 2025
OPERA • 20 MIN
A Way Forward
A short opera following three generations of a Mexican family confronting foreclosure — and each other.
Commissioned by Washington National Opera, 2024.
ORCHESTRAL • 7 MIN
Tree Bees
Full orchestra. Workshopped 2024. Available for performance — score and parts on request.
2fl (2nd dbl A Fl), 2ob, 2cl, 2bn ·
4hn, 3tpt, 3tbn, tuba · timp, 2perc · strings
PRESS
"Jobin-Acosta's score distinctively shades each character... dulcet bass vocal lines being notably melodious."
"The choir was performing a new song in Coptic — a language nearly extinct except in liturgy. It is very unusual to have new art in Coptic."