Natacha Diels’ work blends choreographed movement, video animation, instrumental practice, and cynical play to construct worlds that are equal parts wonder and unease. Rooted in collage, collaboration, and the transformation of life into ritual, her compositions forge a poetic logic all their own.

Recent projects include Ways to Pass the Day, an opera for two rocks and a mountain, created for Festival Nueva Ópera Buenos Aires (2024); Everything Everywhere, a multimedia spectacle that inquisits the excess of all, in collaboration with Ensemble Adapter (2025); Follow Unfollow, a headphone opera questioning the comfort of comfort— manifested through seductive, beautiful jails— for Ensemble Contrechamps (Festival Archipel, 2025); Somewhere Beautiful, a solo performance in three acts that drifts from life to death, through mechanical rigor and golden absurdity (2022–24); and Beautiful Trouble, an opera for JACK Quartet that assembles fractured moments into a kaleidoscopic meditation on joy, despair, and the human condition (2019–24). Her debut solo album— equal parts confessional and sonic hallucination— came out on Carrier Records in August 2025.

Earlier notable works include Papillon and the Dancing Cranes (Borealis Festival, 2018/2021), a whimsical ballet for construction cranes and a giant butterfly, and I Love Myself Fully and Unconditionally, a performed installation intended to impart good feelings on the visitor— in a haunted-house kind of way— commissioned by Nadar Ensemble for Darmstadt Summer Institute. These pieces, like much of her work, sit somewhere between score and spell, object and event.

Critics have described her music as “brilliant, bananas in the best sense, elegant, eloquent, and loopy” (Steve Smith Night After Night); “a tour de force of reckless imagination and confident craft” (Musical America); “a fairy tale for a fractured world” (Music We Care About), and “the liveliest music of the evening” (LA Review of Books). She is a founding member of Ensemble Pamplemousse (est. 2003), a collective of composer-performers bent on reconfiguring the concert experience, and of WENDY (est. 2024), a trio making continuous sets of experimental theatre that are tender, eerie, and just slightly unstable.

Natacha’s work has been commissioned by institutions such as the Borealis Festival, Fromm Foundation (for Talea Ensemble), Darmstadt International Summer Institute, Barlow Foundation (for JACK Quartet), and Ensemble Contrechamps. Her music has been performed by a wide array of ensembles and soloists including Ensemble Intercontemporain, Ensemble Adapter, TAK Ensemble, hand werk, Nadar Ensemble, Ensemble Decoder, JACK Quartet, Quatuor Impact, Jay Campbell, Laura Cocks, Samuel Favre, Ross Karre, Rane Moore, and Charlotte Mundy. Her collaborators are fearless and occasionally a little strange—just how she likes them.

In parallel with her concert works, Natacha creates short films and music videos that extend her compositional logic into the visual realm. These have been screened internationally in Denmark, New York, Chicago, and Budapest.

She holds degrees in flute performance, interactive telecommunications a.k.a. digital media, and composition from New York University and Columbia University. She is currently Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania where she teaches composition and computer music.