Michelle Agnes Magalhaes is a Brazilian-French composer, improviser, and researcher based in Paris.
Her artistic practice branches through instrumental, orchestral, vocal, chamber, and interactive electronic music. Her music moves beyond stylistic boundaries, playful and inviting listeners to new forms of musical experience. Born in Campo Grande—Brazil's third-largest territory of Indigenous presence—her practice as improviser and pianist stems from this multicultural foundation, engaging with embodied knowledge as living epistemologies.
Her work Mobile (2012) synthesizes her experience as composer and improviser. According to Pascale Criton, the listener experiences an internal transformation moving towards a multidimensional expansion: "an exit towards the cosmos".
Symphonia Botanica, her current project, transforms the orchestra into a living ecosystem, enabling multi-generational collaboration and blending musical styles. The forest-orchestra manifests as a distributed creative network, inspired by the plant world.
In recent years, she has collaborated with various artists. Her collaboration with Clarissa Tossin resulted inBefore the volcanoes sing, revealing how sound, space, and visual arts connect Alongside Frédéric Bevilacqua she created Constella(c)tions (2019), an interactive musical experience that uses web devices and audience participation. With Luca Piovesan she founded the duo Raiz(e), creating music that combines nature recordings, expanded accordion, prepared piano and objects. She has recorded several albums as a duo with double bassist Celio Barros, bridging composition and free jazz.
Her projects have been supported by institutions including Siemens Foundation, UNESCO-Aschberg, IRCAM, FAPESP, Venice Biennale, Camargo Foundation, Diaphoniques, Impuls Neue Musik, Institut Français, EMPAC, Villa Sträuli, Royaumont Abbey, European Commission, STARTS, CAPES, and the Ministries of Culture of Brazil, France, and Norway, and has been performed by L'Itinéraire, Talea Ensemble, International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), and orchestras including the São Paulo Municipal Symphony Orchestra, Croatian Radio and Television Symphony Orchestra, Inhotim Orchestra, São Paulo University Chamber Orchestra.
Her work has been performed by ensembles, orchestras, and artists in the Americas and Europe - L'Itinéraire, Soundinitiative, 2e2M, Lovemusic, Talea Ensemble, Accroche Note, Multilatéral, International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), Abstraït, Percorso Ensemble, Quarteto Prometeo, Zaide Quartet, Promenade Sauvage, Der/Gelbe/Klang, Choeur en Scène, Vertixe Sonora, TaG Neue Musik, Linea, Duo Xamp, PHACE, Zafraan, Goiás Philharmonic Orchestra, São Paulo Municipal Symphony Orchestra, Croatian Radio and Television Symphony Orchestra, Inhotim Orchestra, University of Sao Paulo Chamber Orchestra.
Currently researcher at the Erasmus University College - Royal Conservatory of Brussels, she also teaches at the Francis Poulenc Conservatory in Paris.
PhD in Musicology, University of São Paulo, Brazil 2006-2010
Master in Arts, University of Campinas, Brazil 2004-2006
Undergraduate in Musical Composition, University of Campinas, Brazil 1997-2003
Composition Studies with Salvatore Sciarrino, Accademia Chigiana di Siena, Italy 2014-2015
Composition exchanges and workshops with Chaya Czernowin, Harvard Summer Composition Institute and Impuls
Composition and Aesthetics with H.J. Koellreutter, Londrina Music Festival, Brazil 1994
Fondation Royaumont, France 2025
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, Harvard University, USA 2017
IRCAM-Centre Pompidou, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, France 2015-2016
IRCAM-Centre Pompidou, Composer in Residence, France 2019
STARTS Residency European Commission program, France 2028
EMPAC Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, USA 2019, 2022-23
DRAC French Ministry of Culture, Parcs Nationaux Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, France 2019-2021
Vertigo STARTS, European Commission, IRCAM-Centre Pompidou, France 2019
Villa Sträulli, Winterthur, Switzerland 2016
Camargo Foundation, Cassis, France 2016
Mondes Nouveaux, French Ministry of Culture, France 2022
Institut Français, Oujda, Morocco 2019
Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice, Italy 2013
UNESCO-Aschberg Young Artists Fellowship 2003
Festival De Campos do Jordão, Brazil 2004
Music, dreamed embodied abstractions. Music, laboratory forged between listening, motor experience, nature, and the symbolic.
The seeds of abstraction grow in the soil of physical experience. Composition is above all a gesture, an expression of life.
My pieces embody principles of interconnectedness, integrating a diverse array of musical practices. Openness and listening becomes a form of knowledge, taking residence in soul-bodies to enliven beings.
My scores include a dimension of orality and spontaneous experimentation. Interconnections. Interpretation as a dialogue. Dance of flows.