Silvia Fômina is a composer, author and stage director specialized in polyphonic music, micro-tonality and micro rhythmics. From 1989 to1991 she hold a scholarship of the DAAD and has been a particular student of the composer György Ligeti in Hamburg since then for 13 years.
Fômina was awarded with the First Prize at the Vienna International Composition Competition (1991) and with the Prize of the Academy of Arts in Munich donated by the Ernst-von-Siemens Foundation for her research in instrumental micro-tonal composition in 1993.
Between 1994 and 2015 she has been Artist in Residence at several institutions throughout the world, e.g. at Djerassi Resident Artist Program in Woodside and San Francisco CA, USA (1994/2002/2011), Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris (1995-96), Academy Castle Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany (1999), Wurlitzer Foundation” in Taos NM, USA (2003-04), Tyrone Guthrie Centre Ireland (2009) and Deutsches Studienzentrum in Venedig in Venice (2015).
Fômina produced several commission works, e.g. for Westdeutscher Rundfunk Cologne (1991) and the Berlin Biennial (1993).
At MacDowell in 2005, she composed "Coda," one of the miniatures of her Chess opera. She also began work on the structure of "Time and MacDowell -- Polyphony of a Century," for the Colony's centennial celebration in 2007.
