Biography

Kirsten Milenko is a Paris-based Australian composer, conductor, and orchestrator whose works embody an ethereal and immersive nature. Her compositions are approached as a form of sculpture, shaping and reshaping the listener’s perception of material, akin to observing how shifting patterns of light alter a single form. She was selected for the 2025–27 Académie internationale des jeunes compositrices with the Orchestre de chambre de Paris and is currently composing a song cycle in collaboration with soprano and writer Béatrice de Larragoïti. Her conducting, initially developed through her work as a composer, has since expanded to encompass a wide repertoire for concert and stage. Currently, she is continuing her studies at the École normale de musique de Paris. 

In 2019, Milenko was awarded the Roche Young Commission by Wolfgang Rihm, Artistic Director of Lucerne Festival. Her debut opera and dance-theatre work, Dalloway, premiered at Pulsar Festival in Copenhagen in 2020. She was commissioned for the 2022 ANAM Set, featured on ABC Classic. Her work Helix, composed for percussion, light, and electronics, premiered at Warsaw Autumn 2025 as part of percussionist Bartłomiej Sutt’s PhD project. She completed the 2020–21 Words and Music Workshop with the Opéra Orchestre National de Montpellier, led by Ted Huffman and Sivan Eldar, and attended the Académie du Festival d’Aix with Andrea Breth in 2021. Her work has been recognised through awards such as the Adolph Spivakovsky Scholarship for Composition of Music and the John Amis Award, alongside support from the Idella Fonden and the Almene Fond through the Royal Danish Academy of Music.

Her compositions have received premieres by ensembles and orchestras including the Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra, Ensemble MusikFabrik, Athelas Sinfonietta Copenhagen, the Danish National Vocal Ensemble, Ensemble Offspring, the CSO (Canberra Symphony Orchestra) Chamber Ensemble, and the Adelaide Wind Orchestra. Her music has been recorded on several albums, including Relic, to be featured on an upcoming release by Australian saxophonist Joshua Hyde. She has premiered works at the Staatsoper Hamburg Opera Stabile in collaboration with Hayley Page for the Hamburg Ballet’s Jungen Choreograf:innen, City Recital Hall Angel Place, Associació Cultural Sa Taronja, and Verbrugghen Hall.

Milenko studied composition at the Royal Danish Academy of Music with Simon Løffler and Niels Rosing-Schow, and at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music with Liza Lim and Natasha Anderson, where she received the 2016 Ignaz Friedman Memorial Prize for excellence in composition. She completed the Cursus Program on Composition and Computer Music at IRCAM with Pierre Jodlowski. She has received additional training during summer academies from composers such as: Harrison Birtwistle, Eva Reiter, Francesco Filidei, Zygmunt Krause, and Martin Bresnick.

As a conductor, her training includes the Sorrell Women Conductors Programme at the Royal Academy of Music with Sian Edwards; specialised studies in 20th-century repertoire at the Conservatorio della Svizzera italiana with Arturo Tamayo; and her continued studies with Julien Masmondet at the École Normale de Musique de Paris. She conducted the Lucerne Festival Orchestra at Zürich’s Town Hall in July 2022, in celebration of Switzerland’s first gay marriages.

Her recent orchestration work includes a series of orchestral remixes of electronic pieces by SØS Gunver Ryberg, commissioned by the Aarhus Symphony Orchestra for SPOT Festival 2022, in addition to a reduced orchestration of Wagner’s Tannhäuser Overture for brass, strings, and percussion, which premiered at the Gare du Nord, Bahnhof für Neue Musik, in Basel in 2023.

Milenko is an Associate Artist with the Australian Music Centre.