Andrea Clearfield is an award-winning composer of music for opera, orchestra, chorus, chamber ensemble, dance and multimedia collaborations. She creates deep, emotive musical languages that build cultural and artistic bridges. Clearfield has been praised by The New York Times for her “graceful tracery and lively, rhythmically vital writing”, and the Philadelphia Inquirer for her “compositional wizardry” and “mastery with large choral and instrumental forces.” Her catalog of 175 works includes seventeen large-scale cantatas. Recent pieces are inspired by Tibetan music fieldwork that she conducted in the Nepalese Himalaya, including her opera on the venerated Tibetan saint Milarepa, MILA, Great Sorcerer, presented at the 2019 NYC Prototype Festival to critical acclaim.

Clearfield has been Composer-in-Residence with National Concerts at Carnegie Hall and with the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia. She has been awarded numerous residencies, including a Pew International Residency, as well as fellowships at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, the American Academy in Rome, Yaddo, MacDowell, and Copland House, among others.

Clearfield earned a D.M.A. in composition from Temple University, where she received the university-wide Presidential Fellowship. She served on the composition faculty at The University of the Arts from 1986 – 2011 and is active as a public speaker, curator, and visiting composer. Clearfield played keyboards with the Relâche Ensemble for 25 years and had the great honor of performing with the Court of the Dalai Lama. She served two terms on the board of the Grammy’s, Philadelphia Chapter, and currently serves on the board of Wildflower Composers, highlighting voices of young female, nonbinary, genderqueer and transgender composers. She is also founder, curator and host of the renowned SZALON, featuring contemporary, classical, jazz, electronic, dance, and world music. In 2025 Clearfield was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Musical Fund Society.