ABOUT FINOLA
Photo ©Marco Giugliarelli for the Civitella Foundation, 2024
“edgy and discomforting yet exciting and distinctive,” – The Wire
“[Her] entire album is a wild ride,” – The Washington Post
Finola Merivale is a composer of acoustic and electro-acoustic music, based between France and Ireland. She is currently a 2025–26 Fellow at Columbia University’s Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris. Themes that run across her music include socio-political issues, the climate crisis, nature and a sense of place – both real and imagined. Finola completed her DMA in Composition at Columbia University in 2023, where she studied with George Lewis, Georg Friedrich Haas, Zosha Di Castri and Marcos Balter.
Recent accolades include fellowships from MacDowell (2025) and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation (2024), a 2025 Music Bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland and an award from the New York Council on the Arts. Her compositions have been performed internationally – in North and South America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia – and featured at festivals such as the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival and the Contemporary Music Festival of Buenos Aires. Her music has been performed by the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland, musicians of the Chicago and St. Louis Symphony Orchestras, the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), Talea Ensemble, Desdemona Ensemble, Crash Ensemble, ~Nois Quartet, PRISM Saxophone Quartet and Bearthoven, amongst others. In 2022, Finola’s debut portrait album, Tús – a collaboration with Desdemona – was released on New Focus Recordings. In 2021, Finola and her creative team were the winners of the 2021 Fedora Digital Prize for As an nGnách/Out of the Ordinary, a community opera in virtual reality which was commissioned by Irish National Opera.
Current and upcoming projects include a double percussion concerto for Ian Antonio, Doug Perkins and the University of Michigan Concert Band, a score for a film by Irina Patkanian, a collaboration with choreographer Jakari Sherman and an album with Catherine Sikora.