Daron Hagen (b. 1961) has spent fifty years composing at the highest level, guided from the start by creative honesty and the courage of unvarnished expression. His catalog includes 14 operas, 5 symphonies, over 300 published art songs, and hundreds of other works commissioned by ensembles like the New York Philharmonic and Seattle Opera. He has collaborated with Leonard Bernstein and Gore Vidal, taught at Curtis and the Princeton Atelier, and received honors from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the Kennedy Center, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Throughout his career, institutional plaudits have been the byproducts of an absolute focus on the work itself. Commitment to the development of a distinct creative voice has led him to move naturally between mediums, shaping a unified artistic world where he writes, composes, directs, and edits his pioneering Bardo Trilogy films for worldwide streaming distribution, directs staged revivals of his operas, and publishes the memoir Duet With the Past and a treatise called Exploring Operafilm.

Hagen's music is published by Peermusic Classical and recorded on a dozen labels, including Sony and Naxos; his generative sandbox is the New Mercury Collective, he is a Lifetime Member of the Corporation of Yaddo, and he is represented personally by Encompass Arts.

Hagen lives with his family in Upstate New York. His attention remains entirely on the daily practice of fulfilling musical commissions, mapping out his next operafilm, and writing his first historical novel, The Rosebud Row.