Julia Wolfe

Julia Wolfe (born December 18, 1958) is an American composer. She was born in Philadelphia, holds degrees from the University of Michigan, Princeton and Yale, and currently works in New York. Wolfe's music is rhythmically vigorous and often clangorously dissonant. As a composer associated with the downtown style of new music she is not averse to drawing on rock and minimalism as primary influences. Her music, however, shows a good deal more rhythmic complexity than is generally found in these genres, hence her music can properly be considered and described as postminimalist.

In 1987, Wolfe co-founded Bang on a Can together with composers David Lang and Michael Gordon, her husband. She was awarded a grant in 2000 from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. In 2010, Wolfe was nominated as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Music.

In 2003, she joined the composition faculty of the Manhattan School of Music. Currently she is Director of Music Composition at New York University in the Steinhardt School.