Composer · Violist · Conductor

Dr. Deniz Çağlarcan is a Santa Barbara-based composer, violist, conductor, and transdisciplinary artist from Istanbul, Turkey. His work moves between contemporary concert music, electroacoustic composition, visual music, immersive sound, performance, and screen scoring.

Rooted in more than twenty-five years of classical viola training, Çağlarcan's artistic practice brings together instrumental performance, electronic sound, spatial audio, and image-based composition. His works often explore how sound, gesture, texture, movement, and visual form can evolve together within a shared artistic language.

His creative output includes solo and chamber works, large ensemble music, fixed media, live electronics, audiovisual compositions, site-specific sound installations, arrangements, and music for film and video games. Across these formats, he is especially interested in the relationship between acoustic instruments, electronic sound, visual morphology, and immersive environments.

Çağlarcan's audiovisual and transdisciplinary projects frequently involve collaboration with painters, media artists, computer graphics developers, and machine learning engineers. Inspired by his brother Güneş Çağlarcan's Shadows painting series, he created the audiovisual work Shadows and founded the Shadows Contemporary Art Festival, presented in Kosovo in 2023 and at the University of Nevada, Reno in 2024.

As a performer, Çağlarcan appears as a soloist, chamber musician, contemporary music performer, and interdisciplinary collaborator. His viola practice is shaped by a strong conservatory background, a composer's sensitivity to structure and timbre, and a long-standing interest in extended techniques, electroacoustic music, and new performance contexts.

Çağlarcan holds a Ph.D. in Composition and an M.S. in Media Arts & Technology from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he studied with João Pedro Oliveira and Curtis Roads. He also holds an M.M. in Viola Performance from Central Michigan University and an M.A. in Composition from Bilkent University. He has studied orchestral conducting for over eight years, most recently in depth with José-Luis Maúrtua.

His recent honors include the Prix CIME Residency Award, First Prize at the Corwin Awards for Excellence in Composition, Second Prize at the American Viola Society Maurice Gardner Composition Competition, the Grand Prize at the Indiana State University Music Now Competition, and First Prize at the Golden Classical Music Awards at Carnegie Hall. His music and audiovisual works have been presented at institutions and festivals including the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory, Influx International Acousmatic Festival in Belgium, Taneycomo Festival, UC Santa Barbara, the University of Nevada, Stanford/CCRMA MediaFlock, ICMC, and SMC.

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