Bio

New Hampshire-based composer Katie Semro tells stories with music. Her work is is dramatic, beautiful, and often melodic, but doesn’t shy away from sorrow, anger, and chaos when the story calls for it. She has an unusual composition process which involves using patterns drawn from images or sounds to create the rhythms that form the building blocks of her music. Using this process, she created a duet for viola and cello drawn from the fiber art of Norma Smayda and Laurie Carlson Steger for the Art League RI exhibition Symphony in Fiber which was played in the gallery this May. In August, her piece Let It Sound will receive its second performance, this time as part of the Electric Earth Concert Series in Jaffrey, NH. Currently, she is working on several solo and duo commissions, as well as one for the Bridge Music Collective to be premiered in their 2025-26 season in San Francisco. She is a Gabriela Ortiz Composing Fellow 2025, and she takes private instruction with composer Elena Ruehr.

Semro found her way to composing through spoken word audio and electronic music. In 2023 she released an EP of electronic music, Gone, based on the emotional effects of our intangible losses. She has also collaborated with several visual artists, creating music and audio to accompany their works. Her audio art has been exhibited at Sound Scene Fest at the Hirshhorn Smithsonian Museum, and she won third prize in the 60 Sec Radio Competition in 2023. She is also a composer mentor for Music-COMP.

She lives in a cozy house along the Gridley River in Sharon, NH with her husband and two children.