Biography
Composer, Artistic Researcher, and Educator
Dr. Parisa Sabet is an Iranian-Canadian composer, artistic researcher, and educator whose work brings together music, technology, and collaborative artistic practice. Her practice is socially engaged and ethically responsive, often growing from personal experiences and responses to questions of identity, memory, resilience, justice, and belonging. Through her compositions and interdisciplinary projects, she explores how artistic experiences can invite reflection, dialogue, and human connection.
Composition is at the heart of Sabet's practice. Working across acoustic and electroacoustic music, movement, image, and technology, she investigates relationships between artistic materials and ideas, allowing each project's form to emerge through experimentation and discovery. She is particularly interested in how stories rooted in specific personal and cultural experiences can resonate with people from diverse backgrounds.
Her work ranges from intimate concert music to large-scale interdisciplinary projects, including the mini-opera A Girl Who Missed the Train (2025), the immersive installation Sabzeh (2025), the multimedia compositions Sepideh (2024) and Silent (2022), and her debut album A Cup of Sins (2022). Working with performers, dancers, visual artists, filmmakers, and other collaborators, she creates works in which music, movement, imagery, and materials shape one another.
Sabet's artistic achievements have been recognized through numerous grants and awards. In 2019, she received the University of Toronto's prestigious Tecumseh Sherman Rogers Graduating Award, recognizing her potential to make an important contribution to the field of music. She subsequently received the Kathleen McMorrow Music Award (2020) from the Ontario Arts Foundation and was nominated for the Johanna Metcalf Performing Arts Prize in 2021 and 2023. Her creative and educational initiatives have received support from the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and other organizations.
Her commitment to creativity and collaboration extends into education and artistic leadership. She founded No Need to Vanish, a nonprofit organization dedicated to making music technology education more accessible and supporting individuals in developing their own artistic voices. Her educational work emphasizes curiosity, experimentation, and creative agency.
Sabet has also conceived and led artistic initiatives including Women, Art, Resilience, the Dawn Initiative, and the Israeli-Iranian Musical Initiative. These projects bring artists and audiences together across different backgrounds, creating opportunities for artistic exchange, dialogue, and shared experiences.
She holds a Doctor of Musical Arts, a Master of Music in Composition, and a Master of Music in Music Technology and Digital Media from the University of Toronto.
At the centre of her artistic practice is a question: What does this story ask to become? Guided by curiosity, careful listening, and a commitment to artistic discovery, she continues to explore how composition can connect materials, experiences, and people in meaningful and unexpected ways.
