Paola Prestini is a renowned composer and co-founder of National Sawdust in New York and arts production company, VisionIntoArt. Prestini was a recipient of a 2025 Creative Capital Award, a composer-in-residence at the American Academy of Rome, a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow and has been named one of the Top 35 Female Composers in Classical Music by the Washington Post, one of the top 100 Composers in the World by National Public Radio and one of the Top 30 Professionals of the Year by Musical America. At National Sawdust, she has collaborated with luminaries including poet Robin Coste Lewis, visual artists Julie Mehretu and Nick Cave and musical legends David Byrne, Philip Glass and Renée Fleming, and her works have been performed throughout the world with leading institutions including the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Opera, Dallas Opera, Barbican Centre, Mexico's Bellas Artes, and more.

Prestini's 2025/26 season includes a site-specific production of her multidisciplinary work Houses of Zodiac in the Catacombs of Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery, the Mexico premiere and album release of her acclaimed processional opera Primero Sueño, an operatic re-imagining of Hemmingway’s The Old Man and the Sea at the Wexner Center for the Arts (in a co-production by Opera Columbus and Beth Morrison Projects) and two symphonic world premieres: a co-commission by the Tucson Symphony and a commission by the The Juilliard School, and a performance by Awadagin Pratt and the Dayton Philharmonic of her piano concerto Code.