Sarit Shley Zondiner

Sarit Shley Zondiner, born in 1984, is a prominent young composer in Israel. Her chamber, orchestral, vocal, and theatrical compositions were performed in many concerts and festivals, by major ensembles and orchestras, such as Israel Contemporary Players, Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra, and Meitar Ensemble. For her excellence in composition for various musical genres, she won the Israeli Prime Minister Award for composition in 2024.

Sarit is a faculty member in Haifa University; she focuses on new music and curates ContComp Festival, which presents music and sound from Israel and abroad. Her research deals with timbre, exploring the aesthetic and cultural dimensions it conveys in contemporary art music. Investigating timbre influences her recent creative goals: she is now working on sound exhibition dedicated to Poems of Jerusalem by Yehuda Amichai. The piece’s future performance will take place in the open, conflictual space of the city.

In 2020, her first opera, ASD (Autistic Spectrum Disorder) was performed in Israel Music Fest and was granted from Mifal Hapais.

In 2020-2021 she was awarded the Siday Fellowship for Music Creativity, for her excellence in orchestral writing, exploring and fusing the worlds of melodic and textural transformations. She won the America-Israel Cultural Foundation Scholarship between 2007-2014.

She studied at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance and the Musicology department at the Hebrew University with Amnon Wolman, Assaf Shelleg and Ari Ben Shabetai.