American composer Heather Gilligan strives to write music both edgy and lyrical. Her fresh, organic style is honest, direct, and compassionate while exploring the limits of emotion from humor to anguish. Her growing national acclaim has brought her music across the country and onto main stages over the past several years. She recently won the Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra's 2019 Call for scores for her song cycle Living in Light, chosen from over 2,200 submissions from 90 countries. She was named a Semi-Finalist in The American Prize, 2019 Vocal Chamber Music Division. In January 2019 her song "I'm a Girl. What's your superpower?" won second place in the NYC SongSLAM Festival, an audience choice competition that celebrates classical art song. Gilligan was featured in the Washington D.C. International Music Festival, which premiered her orchestral and wind symphony works at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in 2015 and 2016. Her choral work, I'll See you in the Morning, was premiered in 2014 at Carnegie Hall during the annual New York Choral Festival. Her work for solo flute, Dialogue, was invited for performance at the College Music Society's Rocky Mountain Regional and Great Lakes Regional conferences and in the University of Nebraska's New Music Festival and was chosen for publication in the SCI Journal of Music Scores. She was commissioned by American Modern Ensemble who premiered her chamber sextet, One Mountain, and she won the Boston-based Juventas New Music Ensemble's Call for Scores in both 2018 and 2019.