Raven Chacon

Raven Chacon (born 1977) is a Diné composer, musician, and artist. Born in Fort Defiance, Arizona within the Navajo Nation, Chacon became the first Native American to win a Pulitzer Prize for Music, for his Voiceless Mass in 2022. He has also been a solo performer of noise music and worked with groups such as Postcommodity. Life and career Raven Chacon was born in 1977 in Fort Defiance, Arizona, within the Navajo Nation. He attended the University of New Mexico, where he obtained his BA in Fine Arts in 2001, then received an MFA in music composition from the California Institute of the Arts in 2004. He was a student of James Tenney, Morton Subotnick, Michael Pisaro, Wadada Leo Smith and Christopher Shultis. Chacon’s visual and sonic artwork has been exhibited widely in the U.S. and abroad. His room-sized sound and text installation, Still Life, #3 (2015), was exhibited in the Transformer: Native Art in Light and Sound exhibition at the National Museum of the American Indian, New York. His collective and solo work has been presented at Sydney Biennale, Kennedy Center, the Whitney Biennial, Adelaide International, Vancouver Art Gallery, ASU Art Museum, Musée d’art contemporain de Mon