Born in Salt Lake City in 2001, Maya had her first composition lessons in high school with Devin Maxwell and through Luna Composition Lab, also pursuing private study with Chaya Czernowin at Harvard, after which she attended the Curtis Institute of Music, studying with Nick DiBerardino, Jonathan Bailey Holland, Amy Beth Kirsten, David Ludwig, and Steve Mackey, and graduating in 2024 with her Bachelor of Music in Composition and the Charles Miller Prize/Alfredo Cassella Award for Composition. She received her Master of Music in Composition in 2026 from the Yale School of Music, where she studied with Katherine Balch, Martin Bresnick, Aaron Jay Kernis, David Lang, and Christopher Theofanidis, and was awarded the school’s highest excellence award, the Emily Anne Payne Dean’s Prize, upon graduation. During her academic career at Yale, she also received the Ezra Laderman Prize for best composition for voice or music theater, the Harriet Fox Gibbs Memorial Prize for top first-year academic work, and an Audience Choice Prize in the Creative Entrepreneurship category at Startup Yale 2025 for her medical humanities/opera project, Patience.
Maya will begin PhD studies in Music and Multimedia Composition at Brown University in the autumn of 2026.
She formed the performance art duo ~ [pronounced two] with Sarrah Bushara in 2020 and is published in the BabelScores Catalog, an online library based in Paris. Her favorite song is Rock’n’Roll Suicide by David Bowie, and in her pain-free spare time she studies Gaga, a movement language by choreographer Ohad Naharin.
biography // values
The work of interdisciplinary composer-performer-director Maya Miro Johnson researches body|politics: the intersection of public and private health in cyborg spaces like the screen, the instrument, and her own body. Freely navigating between artistic research and expression in embodied music-making, multimedia theater techniques, and the history of science and medicine, her unique brand of disabled futurism creates networks of intermingled questions. Her music has been performed across the world, from the Colorado River of southern Utah to Svalbard, Tokyo, Lucerne, Paris, and New York City.
Trained in dance, theater, and multimedia, she has created for artists including Kronos Quartet, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, Sarasota Festival, loadbang,Rock School of Ballet, Barnes Foundation, Cincinnati May Festival, UC Davis, Moab Music Festival, De Orkest Ereprijs, Baltic Sea Festival, Tanglewood Music Center, & Copland House (CULTIVATE). Semi-finalist in BMP’s 2021 Next Gen competition, runner-up in the 2024 Élan Awards, honorable mention in 2024 NYYS First Music commissions, and winner of both 2020 BMI Schuman and Surinach Prizes (a historical first), she appears on HOCKET’s #What2020LooksLike, Johnny Gandelsman’s This is America, Inna Faliks’ Manuscripts Don’t Burn, Katelyn Bouska’s Hildegard and Her Sisters, and the Marin Alsop documentary, The Conductor. She served as a cover conductor for the Minnesota Orchestra in 2022, including BIS Records’ Mahler Symphony No. 8 with Osmo Vänska.
Major works include a violin concerto for Emma Meinrenken, an opera with Christina Herresthal, and a percussion-theater work for Diego Alfonso. Summers have been spent at Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, Bergen International Festival, Aspen Music Festival, soundSCAPE, Tanglewood, Darmstadt, IYCA Ticino, Next Festival of Emerging Artists, and the Lucerne Composers Seminar.