Daron Hagen occupies a unique position in American music as both a concert music and opera composer and as a visionary auteur composer-director on the vanguard of operafilm, a genre in which he weaves together aesthetic, practical, and technical correlatives between music, drama, film, and their performance practices to manifest narrative. Along with screenings at festivals, his Bardo Trilogy operafilms are internationally laureled and viewable worldwide on major streamers including Amazon Prime Video. His book Exploring Operafilm: Making the Bardo Trilogy will be published in April 2026 by McFarland and Company.

Commissioned for five decades by international ensembles and institutions including the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, National Symphony, the Buffalo Philharmonic, and Seattle Opera, his works are perennially programmed. His collaborators include Leonard Bernstein, JoAnn Falletta, Lukas Foss, Gary Graffman, Jaime Laredo, Kate Lindsey, Paul Muldoon, Marni Nixon, Gerard Schwarz, Paul Sperry, and Gore Vidal. His memoir, Duet with the Past, was published in 2019 and have its audiobook release in May 2025.

A Lifetime Member of the Corporation of Yaddo and Guggenheim Fellow, he has received two Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Fellowships, the Bogliasco and Camargo Fellowships, the ASCAP-Nissim Prize, Kennedy Center Friedheim Prize, NEA and Opera America grants, and two American Academy of Arts and Letters Awards. He has led music festivals and non-profit foundations and taught at Bard, Curtis, the Chicago College of Performing Arts and the Princeton Atelier.

Recorded on Naxos and Sony, published by Peermusic Classical, represented by Encompass Arts, a graduate of Curtis and Juilliard, he and Gilda Lyons have two children.