Michelle Isaac is a Chicago-based composer and orchestrator known for her playful and poignant works for the concert hall, stage, and screen. Often employing elements of humor and extensive historical research, she creates deeply nuanced narrative-driven music that is delectably intricate and sweepingly cinematic.
Isaac’s 2025-26 concert season features four world premieres of newly commissioned works for large ensembles: Pressing Truths for orchestra and soprano, honoring the only woman whose name is printed on the Declaration of Independence, commissioned by the Reno Philharmonic and Music Director Laura Jackson and featuring soprano Ashley Fabian; a new concert-opener commissioned by the Illinois Symphony Orchestra led by Music Director Taichi Fukumura commemorating the Route 66 Centennial; a celebration of community music-making commissioned by the Crystal Lake Community Band directed by Terry Grossberg, and a collaborative educational piece for young band students.
A Chicago DCASE grant winner and Chicago Sinfonietta’s inaugural Freeman Composing Fellow, Isaac has reached audiences globally, with notable performances by the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Sinfonietta at Millennium Park, Navy Pier, Symphony Center, and Auditorium Theatre, Paradox Opera, the UW-River Falls Percussion Ensemble, and the Knox-Galesburg Symphony. She received the Gerts and Hammond Award from the Musicians Club of Women, and through her Chicago Sinfonietta fellowship received mentorship from Music Director Mei-Ann Chen and composers Jennifer Higdon, Joel Thompson, and Kathryn Bostic. She won first prize at songSLAM Chicago 2023 for What Every Woman Must Not Say, part of her Are Women People? song cycle that features a “delicious setting” (Chicago Classical Review) of suffragist Alice Duer Miller’s poetry. Isaac is enthusiastically active in music education, and she has held faculty and guest lecturer positions at Roosevelt University, The People’s Music School, OPUS Chamber Music Camp, Chicago Area Music Teachers Composition Festival, Pianos in the Park, and an ongoing residency with Woodridge (IL) School District 68.
Isaac was the inaugural winner of the Miriam Mayer Perspective Composer Grant, awarded by a panel of top Hollywood composers and agents as an exciting new voice in film scoring. Her media projects include scoring the College of St. Benedict Alumni Podcast, sonic branding for Peckham Media Productions, and score preparation for Barbie The Movie: In Concert and Labyrinth: In Concert. She created a 90-minute orchestral/EDM fusion score for a sold-out Nutcracker-parody theatrical production at Chicago's Greenhouse Theatre, hailed by Third Coast Review as "a techno-classical menage that is the perfect accompaniment to the outrageous merriment on the stage." She is an active member of the Society of Composers and Lyricists Chicago chapter and is currently scoring short films by local Chicago artists.
A native of Waukegan, IL, Isaac is an accomplished percussionist and pianist, getting her musical start in the Waukegan Public School system. She earned her Master of Music in Composition from the Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University, where she studied with Stacy Garrop and Kyong Mee Choi, and her Bachelor of Arts in Music from the College of Saint Benedict.