Winner of the Academy Award, given for lifetime achievement, from the American Academy of Arts & Letters, as well as the Rome Prize and Guggenheim Fellowships, Nathan Currier has frequently been honored for his compositions: he also received the Fulbright, NEA, NYFA, Fromm, Ives, Barlow, and ASCAP prizes, as well as the Silver Medal, as a pianist, in the International Piano Recording Competition, for a performance of Bach's Goldberg Variations.

Last season, two of his chamber works were performed at the Berlin Philharmonic, including the premiere of his Possum Wakes from Playing Dead, commissioned by the Berlin Philharmonic. He was the winner of the 2008 International Sackler Prize for Composition, and as such his recently completed Piano Concerto will be premiered in March, 2010. A 2008-2009 award from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities will culminate in the premiere of War Music, an evening length work of music and theater.

Renowned critic Tim Page has written that “Currier’s music is often wildly virtuosic,” and that his “engaging, virtuosic and richly inventive” works do not “fit into any of the pre-fabricated categories that have been set aside to describe composers...ultimately, Currier is an independent, with no seeming allegiance to any creed but the most valuable one of all – that of creating a succinct, personal and well-crafted music.”

Currier recently served on the faculty of the University of Virginia for two years, and previously had taught at Juilliard. He studied at Juilliard and Peabody, was the Leonard Bernstein Fellow in composition at Tanglewood, and also holds a Diplome, with First Prize, from the Royal Conservatory of Belgium.

Other important musical works include his quintet Thirty Little Pictures of Time Passing, premiered as part of the Berlin Philharmonic’s chamber music series in 2004. His one act monodrama A Kafka Cantata was rated the #1 Musical Event of the Year in Pittsburgh by that city’s chief newspaper after its premiere there, and his music has also been broadcast nationally in the U.S. on National Public Radio with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and heard at major musical establishments such as the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. His large oratorio Gaian Variations was premiered at Avery Fisher Hall on Earth Day 2004. His music is recorded on Chandos, Crystal and New World Records, and is published by Theodore Presser Co.

Currier is unique among composers for his active involvement with climate science. He has spoken on climate at UNICEF headquarters at the UN, Columbia University, New York University, and the University of Virginia, among many others. He is a member of Al Gore’s Climate Project, and has presented to almost 1,000 people about climate change.