Vanessa Lann (New York, 1968) began composing and playing the piano at the age of five and has continued ever since. She studied composition with Ruth Schonthal at the Westchester Conservatory of Music, where she received the William Petchek Scholarship. For two summers she was a scholarship student at the Tanglewood Institute, and she holds degrees from Harvard University and the Royal Conservatory of The Hague in the Netherlands. Her works are performed throughout the world, in such venues as the Philharmonie (Berlin), Lincoln Center (New York), Wigmore Hall (London), the Doelen (Rotterdam) and the Concertgebouw and Muziekgebouw (Amsterdam), as well as at leading European and American festivals. She has received commissions and prizes from internationally renowned soloists, ensembles and organizations.

Her opera, The Silence of Sarah, was premiered in 2013. The large-scale choreographed work O Whispering Suns (2011), for Patricia Kopatchinskaja (violin), Viktor Kopatchinsky (cimbalom) and 100 singers, is a setting of Walt Whitman's Song of Myself. Her bassoon concerto, Double | Reed, was written on request of the acclaimed soloist Bram van Sambeek and the chamber orchestra Sinfonia Rotterdam and was premiered under the direction of Conrad van Alphen in 2014. Her orchestral piece, Dancing to an Orange Drummer, was created for the Boston Pops Orchestra and received its first performance under the baton of Keith Lockhart in Symphony Hall, Boston, in 2015.

Lann lives and works in the Netherlands as a composer, pianist and university professor (teaching musicology, mathematics, Eastern philosophy and multimedia at Webster Univsersity Leiden). Lann's music is published by DONEMUS, is broadcast frequently and is included in many CDs and recordings. Her most recent CD, moonshadow sunshadow, is a compilation of pieces from the past 25 years, on the ATTACCA label.

Her work makes varied use of repeated figures, as well as structures based on number ratios and patterns, to explore concepts of continuity, infinity and silence. Ritual and humor are important elements of her music, and she often places everyday sounds and gestures in unusual contexts, thus illuminating them from new and surprising perspectives.

She recently received the 2019 Buma Classical Award for being the most-performed Dutch composer worldwide.