Jorge Martín-Buján was born in Cuba in 1959 and has lived in the United States since 1965. He holds degrees from Yale College and Columbia University. He writes in all major genres and his music is commissioned and performed by all kinds of artists and groups across the U.S.  In 1999 and again in 2012 he received a generous Cintas Fellowship for creative artists of Cuban descent, and also the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ prestigious Academy Award in Music in 1998. In 2005 Mr. Martín was awarded a fellowship by the Bogliasco Foundation in Genoa, and artist’s residencies at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs in 1993 and again in 2003. The Fort Worth Opera Festival presented the World Premiere of Martín’s first full-length large-scale opera, Before Night Falls, in the spring of 2010; Florida Grand Opera revived the production in 2017. The world premiere audio recording of the opera appears on the Albany Records label is available on Spotify, Apple Music, and CD. Opera Southwest in Albuquerque, New Mexico is mounting a new production with a new arrangement by the composer with a reduced orchestration in March 2024. His tour-de-force 65-minute song cycle The Glass Hammer was recorded by the legendary American baritone Sanford Sylvan with David Breitman and has since been taken up by a handful of brilliant young artists; most recently by Jonathan Hays with Craig Ketter and currently by Robert Wesley Mason with Sarah Thune. In 2020 Martín-Buján was honored by a consortium of El Paso’s leading cultural institutions with a commission to write a 40-minute Requiem for large orchestra, chorus and soloists to commemorate the dead from the Walmart shooting in 2019. The El Paso Symphony Orchestra performed it twice in fall 2021. Mr. Martín-Buján has numerous other recordings available commercially, and he is a member of A.S.C.A.P.