San Francisco-based composer Patricia Wallinga connects audiences with unheard stories, voices, and ideas of the modern world. Her intricate, charismatic music engages with traditions from literature, dance, theater, and folk music alongside influences from the classical canon. Her work has earned praise as “quite powerful” (Bloomington Herald-Times) and “damn brilliant” (conductor and composer Eric Whitacre).
In January 2025, Wallinga's opera The Sisters was workshopped and recorded by Philadelphia-based opera company Liberty City Arts, who will premiere the opera in June 2025. Other highlights of Wallinga’s career include residency as a composer fellow at the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music in collaboration with the Del Sol String Quartet, and a 2023 project reimagining Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel’s Sonata in G Minor as a piano concerto (in collaboration with pianist Sharon Su).
Wallinga is particularly fond of art song, a genre where she has earned notable early-career accolades. She won a 2015 BMI Student Composer Award for her first song cycle, Dreams in War Time, and was named a finalist for the National Association of Teachers of Singing 2019 Art Song Composition Award for her 2018 cycle The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.
Wallinga holds degrees in composition from Indiana University and San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Outside of her work as a composer, Wallinga is also a mezzo-soprano, particularly active in contemporary choral music. She currently sings with the International Orange Chorale of San Francisco. She also advocates extensively online for equality and modernity in the classical music community.