Sabrina Peña Young

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 the 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 Kalup Linzy in his film Conversations wid de churn II and studying film for a year at Florida International University 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. 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. In 2014, Young gave a TED Talk at TEDxBuffalo on "Singing Geneticists and EPIC Machinima Opera". Libertaria was presented at the Holland Animation Film Festival, AnimaSyros, Buffalo Dreams Fantastic Film Festival, the Hildegaard Festival, Opera America in New York City, and TEDxBuffalo, as well as online and throughout the United States. In 2015 Young published her debut novel Libertaria: Genesis as an addendum to her groundbreaking opera and collaborated with composer Lee Scott on his interactive social media opera The Village. In 2018 Young was awarded the prestigious Cintas Foundation Bradley Fradd Composer Fellowship, a distinguished award for composers of Cuban descent. The CINTAS Fellowships have given Cuban artists "the incentive to work, the hope of a viable future" by awarding fellowships in visual arts, architecture, and composition to notable artists of Cuban descent. Young continues to delve into media and sound and is actively involved in the Western New York film community where she has produced, written, directed, and acted in local indie film productions. Young is in production for Spiritus, an original science fiction animated film, and her animated opera "Alicia", a film inspired by graphic novels, the works of Lewis Carroll, and the unique Latino experience. Alicia will be premiered in 2022. Young was the recipient of the 2019 Lois Weber Award at the Buffalo Dreams Fantastic Film Festival. The award is named in honor of Lois Weber (1879 - 1939), the first female film director in the United States, and recognizes the accomplishes of women who have distinguished themselves in the art of filmmaking.