Cecilia Livingston specializes in music for voice. She is composer-in-residence at the Canadian Opera Company (2022-) and was composer-in-residence at Glyndebourne (2019-2022). Her music is driven by melody, mixing styles to create work that is lyrical and unsettling, and her work has been performed at Glyndebourne, Teatro Colón, Teatro Carlo Felice, Bang on a Can’s summer festival, Toronto’s Nuit Blanche festival, in recital at Koerner Hall, Carnegie Hall, the Barbican, and the Kennedy Center, by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestra, Tafelmusik, and Soundstreams, and is available on recording from Deutsche Grammophon.

Current projects include an orchestral song cycle with Orange Prize winning poet Anne Michaels and new work for the Canadian Opera Company. Winner of the 2024 Louis Applebaum Composers Award “for excellence in composition for theatre, music theatre, dance or opera,” Cecilia’s creative work is supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the Toronto Arts Council, and SOCAN Foundation.

Cecilia was a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Postdoctoral Fellow in Music at King's College London and her writing has been published in Tempo, the Cambridge Opera Journal, The Opera Quarterly, and in The Cambridge Companion to Composition. She has given papers on contemporary opera at the Royal Musical Association, American Musicological Society, and Modern Language Association (MLA) annual conferences; in 2024 she was appointed to the MLA Forum Executive Committee on Opera and Musical Performance for a five-year term. In the summer of 2022 Cecilia joined the faculty of the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and she is Vice-President of the Canadian League of Composers and an associate composer of the Canadian Music Centre.

Cecilia is represented by Stratagem Artists in New York.