Ellen Taaffe Zwilich Biography

Ellen Taaffe Zwilich (born April 30, 1939, in Miami, Florida) is an American composer, the first female composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music. Her early works are marked by atonal exploration, but by the late 1980s she had shifted to a post-modernist, neo-romantic style.[citation needed] She has been called "one of America’s most frequently played and genuinely popular living composers." She was a 1994 inductee into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame.