Moananuiākea is a new work for string quartet celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the Hōkūleʻa’s first voyage to Tahiti. The musical language of this piece brings to life voyaging on the ocean without modern technology, from being caught in the doldrums to the sheets of rain in a tropic storm and the greeting calls of blown conch shells. Performances of the work have been paired with community activities and educational resources around the subject of Polynesian Voyaging. In addition, public engagement in Hawaiʻi, California, Pennsylvania, and New York provide opportunities for audience members to strengthen eco-social engagement through participation in volunteer activities related to caring for the ocean and canoe plants, as an extension of the mission of Hōkūleʻa to care for the earth and oceans—the inspiration for Lanzilotti’s artistic work.
This project was awarded a 2025 AWAW Environmental Art Grant with support from Anonymous Was a Woman in partnership with The New York Foundation for the Arts. The musical work was completed while in residence at Copland House, Cortlandt Manor, New York, as a recipient of the Copland House Residency Award. The project’s musical premiere was supported, in part, by a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant.
Leilehua Lanzilotti (b. 1983) is a composer, violist, multimedia artist, curator, and scholar whose work explores color, timbre, place, displacement, and layered time. A 2022 Pulitzer Prize finalist in Music for with eyes the color of time, she has also received a Creative Capital Award, the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation SHIFT – Transformative Change and Indigenous Arts Award, and was named a 2025 USA Fellow.
Her music has been presented internationally at Ars Electronica, the Ojai Music Festival, the Philharmonie de Paris, and Tokyo Metropolitan Theatre. In 2025, her of light and stone opened the New York Philharmonic’s season and Gustavo Dudamel’s first concert as Music & Artistic Director designate.
As a performer, Lanzilotti has appeared on recordings by Björk, Joan Osborne, and David Lang, and premiered Dai Fujikura’s Viola Concerto Wayfinder. Her solo album in manus tuas was named one of The Boston Globe's Top 10 Classical Albums of 2019.
Her experimental sound and video installations have been presented at The Noguchi Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Honolulu Museum of Art. Formerly Curator of Music at EMPAC, she now works independently on projects including the nationally touring exhibition Toshiko Takaezu: Worlds Within. Her scholarship appears in publications from Yale University Press and the Calder Foundation. She has taught at New York University, the University of Northern Colorado, and the Banff Centre. leilehualanzilotti.com