Chicago-based composer and orchestrator Michelle Isaac is known for her playful and poignant works for the concert hall, stage, and screen. She was the inaugural winner of the Miriam Mayer Perspective Composer Grant, awarded by a panel of top Hollywood composers and agents as an exciting new voice in film scoring. Michelle's media projects include scoring the College of St. Benedict Alumni Podcast, sonic branding for Peckham Media Productions, and music preparation for Barbie The Movie: In Concert which is currently touring the United States under the baton of rising star Broadway conductor Macy Schmidt. Michelle created a 90-minute orchestral/EDM fusion score for a sold-out Nutcracker-parody theatrical production at Chicago's Greenhouse Theatre, hailed by Third Coast Review as "a techno-classical menage that is the perfect accompaniment to the outrageous merriment on the stage."
A Chicago DCASE grant winner and Chicago Sinfonietta’s inaugural Freeman Composing Fellow, Michelle's concert works are often vehicles for telling unheard stories of overlooked figures. She is currently commissioned by the Reno Philharmonic for an upcoming symphonic piece depicting Mary Katharine Goddard, the only women whose name is printed on the Declaration of Independence. Her widely-performed song cycle Hope!, commissioned by LYNX’s Amplify Series, recounts the heartfelt personal story of a young non-speaking man with autism. The Knox-Galesburg Symphony commissioned and premiered her Mother Bickerdyke string quartet, which tells the heroic story of Mary Ann Bickerdyke, a Civil War nurse and Galesburg native. Michelle received first prize at songSLAM Chicago 2023 for What Every Woman Must Not Say, part of her Are Women People? song cycle that features a “delicious setting” (Chicago Classical Review) of suffragist Alice Duer Miller’s poetry. Her orchestral works for Chicago Sinfonietta drew inspiration from the whimsical dream of her one-hundred-year-old grandfather (Moshe’s Dream) and the impending perils of climate change (Earth Triptych).
Michelle’s music has been heard globally, with notable performances by the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Sinfonietta at Millennium Park, Navy Pier, and Symphony Center, Paradox Opera, the UW-River Falls Percussion Ensemble, and many of Chicago’s top instrumentalists and vocalists. She received the Gerts and Hammond Award from the Musician’s Club of Women, and through her Chicago Sinfonietta fellowship received mentorship from Music Director Mei-Ann Chen and composers Jennifer Higdon, Joel Thompson, and Kathryn Bostic. Michelle is enthusiastically active in music education, running a 2023 summer composing workshop with The People’s Music School and creating the Composing Notes video series for Chicago Sinfonietta. She is currently in her third year as a guest artist with Woodridge (IL) School District 68, collaborating on a groundbreaking project that incorporates student compositions into a piece for their junior high bands.
A native of Waukegan, IL, Michelle is an accomplished percussionist and pianist, getting her musical start in the Waukegan Public School system. She earned her Master of Music in Composition from the Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University, where she studied with Stacy Garrop and Kyong Mee Choi, and her Bachelor of Arts in Music from the College of Saint Benedict.