Stephanie

susberich

Composer-Vocalist

Dr. Stephanie Susberich (DMA, Composition, University of Missouri–Kansas City, 2025) is a first-generation American composer and vocalist whose work inhabits the space where story, resonance, ritual, and historical memory converge. Her compositional practice is particularly concerned with the recovery of women’s voices from the archive, returning words obscured or nearly lost to history to living sound. She is the founder and artistic director of DVSSIMA, a New York–based creative house and salon series devoted to intimate, immersive musical experiences shaped by elegance, interiority, and form.

Her doctoral dissertation composition, The Lily of Quito, a 40-minute cantata setting the original words of Saint Mariana de Jesús de Paredes, will receive its New York premiere on October 28, 2026, at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola on Park Avenue, with Dr. Susberich performing the title role. Drawing directly upon the saint’s own words, the cantata centers the life and writings of the patroness of Ecuador, tracing a devotional arc through sacrifice, beauty, death, and transcendence, and culminating in a vision of the saint’s passage into eternity. The Lily of Quito has also been included in the musical archives of Joaquín Rodrigo in Madrid due to its quotation of a melody from Rodrigo’s aria La despedida de Azucena, drawn from his unfinished oratorio La Azucena de Quito, which concerns the same saint.

Her music has been premiered by ensembles and organizations including Uptown Camerata, Composers Concordance, the Etchings Festival, International Contemporary Ensemble, and Radius Ensemble. Composer Anna Clyne has praised Susberich’s “intuition for form and counterpoint/harmony,” her creation of “really beautiful sonorities,” and her “great use of space,” singling out Aphrodite for flute and oboe and her work for the International Contemporary Ensemble, a cloak, a cluster, a casing, for harp, flute, and guitar.

As a vocalist, Susberich brings her operatic background into close relationship with her work as a composer. Lisa Kao, a former member of the Liederkranz Foundation, has described Susberich’s music as “nothing short of breathtaking,” praising the way she “seamlessly blends the elegance of opera with a modern touch” to create a sound that is “both timeless and deeply moving.” Susberich has appeared as a performer in venues ranging from Los Angeles’s Viper Room to NJPAC, and throughout New York City at Joe’s Pub, Dixon Place, the cell theatre, Cornelia Street Café, NYU’s Kimmel Center, Pangea, and Old St. Patrick’s Basilica, as well as at Kansas City’s Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception and the University of Missouri–Kansas City’s White Hall and Grant Hall.

On March 8, 2026, International Women’s Day, she presented a sold-out performance of her song cycle Songs of Juana Borrero at the cell theatre in Chelsea as part of Carnegie Hall’s city-wide United in Sound: America at 250 Festival, in a program presented by the Cuban Cultural Center marking the 130th anniversary of Borrero’s death. The recording of the cycle was released as Susberich’s debut album, Songs of Juana Borrero, on Composers Concordance Records, with cover artwork by Cuban painter Héctor Frank.

The cycle originated as Susberich’s master’s thesis at Tufts University (2022), setting the poetry of the nearly forgotten Cuban poet Juana Borrero, who died in political exile in Key West at the age of eighteen while her country fought for independence. Borrero’s brief life was marked by extraordinary artistic intensity, devotion, and visionary inwardness. Her work exemplifies a central current in Susberich’s artistic practice: an engagement with the archive as a site of recovery, particularly of women’s voices that have been obscured, neglected, or nearly lost to history. By returning Borrero’s words to living sound, Susberich’s work moves beyond commemoration toward a form of artistic restoration, allowing a voice separated from contemporary audiences by more than a century to speak again through music. Susberich’s commitment to recovering neglected voices has also been recognized by composer Jake Heggie, who, following a master class during her doctoral studies, told her, “The work you’re doing is important.”

While completing her doctorate, Dr. Susberich served for three semesters as a Graduate Teaching Assistant in the UMKC Composition Department, teaching laboratories in instrumentation, notation, and twentieth-century counterpoint, and offering private composition instruction to undergraduate composers. She earned a High Pass on her DMA comprehensive examinations and maintained a 4.0 GPA throughout her doctoral studies.

Across composition, performance, and curatorial practice, Dr. Susberich approaches music as both a living art and a vessel of memory: a potent force through which voices may be recovered, histories revivified, and the sublime made intimate. Her aesthetic draws the sacred and the sensual into the same space, joining Gothic darkness with luminosity, formal restraint with luxuriant sonority, and devotional intensity with an embodied, deeply sensuous relationship to sound. These qualities do not function as opposites in her work, but exist simultaneously: beauty is at once disciplined and voluptuous, shadowed and radiant, spiritual and corporeal. Whether writing or singing, Susberich is drawn to the charged threshold where mortality, desire, devotion, and transcendence entwine, inviting listeners into an intimate encounter with sound, language, and the lives—and afterlives—carried within them.