Clara Hunter-Latham

Born 1981 in Eugene, OR/USA.

Clara Hunter Latham is a composer, performer, and musicologist based in Boston and New York City. As a child, she lived in Papua New Guinea and Tasmania and began studies in music composition at Oberlin Conservatory of Music/USA in 2000. She received her Ph.D. from New York University in 2015, where she studied with Suzanne G. Cusick and Elizabeth Hoffman. Her work has been supported by a NYU MacCracken fellowship, the NYU Dean’s Dissertation fellowship, the Woodrow Wilson Dissertation fellowship in Women’s Studies, and the American Composer’s Forum.

She has published articles in Women & Music, Contemporary Modern European History, and the edited volume Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience. Recent compositions include a musiktheater work titled Studies on Hysteria, performed with Peter Evans and Sam Pluta, New York (2013), and a string quartet for ensemble mise-en, New York (2014).

Last year she received a JFund commissioning grant for New Music from the American Composer’s Forum to support her current work in progress, an opera about the birth of psychoanalysis. She is also working on a monograph on the role of speech in the transformation between hypnosis and psychoanalysis.