Armenian-American composer and documentarian Mary Kouyoumdjian has made history through a GRAMMY® nomination for the world premiere recording of her electroacoustic chamber opera “Adoration,” marking the first time an opera by an Armenian composer has been recognized in the Best Opera Recording category. The nomination is for the 2026 GRAMMY Awards. The work follows a high school student whose fictional story about a terrorist plot goes viral, revealing how grief, racism, and media distortion can hide the truth, reports The Armenian Weekly.
“Adoration” was released digitally on August 8, 2025, on Bright Shiny Things and is available on all streaming platforms. Adapted from the film of the same name by Armenian-Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan, the libretto was written by Royce Vavrek, and the work was produced and given its world premiere in New York City by Beth Morrison Projects. Conducted by Alan Pierson, the cast features Miriam Khalil, Omar Najmi, David Adam Moore, and GRAMMY® Award winner Karim Sulayman, alongside Naomi Louisa O’Connell, Marc Kudisch, and Sammy Ivany.
They are joined by the GRAMMY®-nominated Choir of Trinity Wall Street under Thomas McCargar, the Silvana Quartet, and sound designer Daniel Neumann, with electronics by Kouyoumdjian. The album was recorded live during PROTOTYPE Festival performances between January 12 and 20, 2024, at The Sheen Center for Thought and Culture in New York City.
The protagonist of “Adoration,” Simon, is an orphaned high school student encouraged by a teacher, as part of a dramatic writing exercise, to appropriate details from a historical terrorist attack as an event perpetrated by his parents. When his story goes viral, Simon uses the hysteria in his community and online to highlight the challenges of intolerance and racism. “Adoration” tells two simultaneous stories, a fictional account of terrorism and betrayal next to a real story of family strife and rejection, until a final revelation fits them together.
Kouyoumdjian received an OPERA America commissioning grant to create the adaptation of Egoyan’s film, along with Royce Vavrek. After its premiere as part of the 2024 Prototype Festival, the opera had its West Coast premiere at LA Opera in February 2025.
In addition to her work on “Adoration,” Kouyoumdjian has earned wide recognition across contemporary music. She was a finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Music and has received commissions from leading institutions, including the New York Philharmonic, Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Kronos Quartet, Beth Morrison Projects, Alarm Will Sound, Bang on a Can, Fresno Philharmonic, California Symphony, Knoxville Symphony, Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra, Brooklyn Youth Chorus, the American Composers Forum, Roomful of Teeth, WQXR, and Helen Simoneau Danse. Her music has been performed at major venues and festivals such as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MASS MoCA, the Barbican Centre, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Millennium Park, Benaroya Hall, the New York Philharmonic Biennial, the Prototype Festival, the Cabrillo Festival, the Big Ears Festival, the 21C Music Festival, Cal Performances, and international festivals.
Her creative work extends into film, where she composed the original score for the documentary “An Act of Worship,” produced by Capital K Pictures and PBS’s POV Docs, and orchestrated the soundtrack for the Focus Features film “The Place Beyond the Pines.” She holds a D.M.A. and M.A. in composition from Columbia University, an M.A. in Scoring for Film and Multimedia from New York University, and a B.A. in Music Composition from the University of California, San Diego. A dedicated educator, she teaches composition at The New School and has previously taught at Columbia University, the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University, Boston Conservatory at Berklee, and Brooklyn College’s Feirstein School of Cinema.
Kouyoumdjian is also the Co-Founder of the New Music Gathering conference and has served as Executive Director of the contemporary music ensemble Hotel Elefant and as Co-Artistic Director of Alaska’s Wild Shore New Music festival. In an artist statement in the booklet, she writes: “I believe that artists are the speakers of difficult truths. As a member of a family displaced from both the Lebanese Civil War and Armenian Genocide, I consider my freedom of expression here in the United States to be an immense privilege, and so I am drawn to stories that are both challenging to confront and to speak… Filmmaker Atom Egoyan has created such a story with his film ‘Adoration,’ and I am incredibly grateful to have spent the last several years living in this wonderfully challenging space in adapting his film into an opera… Our world continues to be fractured over unresolved multi-generational traumas that can cause horrifying divisions, globally and often in the closeness of our own families; however, like the story behind ‘Adoration,’ individuals and communities, at their very best, also find beautiful ways through these divisions.”
