Gabriella Smith

Gabriella Smith is a composer from the San Francisco Bay Area whose music is shaped by the natural world and by climate action. She grew up playing and writing music, hiking, backpacking and volunteering on a songbird research project, and her pieces often start from new instrumental sounds and long arcs drawn from particular landscapes.

Her first full-length album, Lost Coast (2021), was recorded with her longtime collaborator, the cellist Gabriel Cabezas, and producer Nadia Sirota at Greenhouse Studios in Reykjavík. The album sets layers of Cabezas’s cello against Smith’s voice and found percussion, and grew from a concerto she was writing for him; the orchestral Lost Coast was premiered by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel, in May 2023. Smith and Cabezas also perform together as a duo for cello, violin, voice and electronics.

Her organ concerto Breathing Forests was written for James McVinnie.