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Kati Ilona Agócs is a composer of contemporary classical music and faculty member at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, Massachusetts. Agócs was raised on a small farm in Southwestern Ontario by Hungarian and American parents. Her father left Hungary after the 1956 uprising against the Stalinist government and traveled to Italy and the United States before finally settling in Canada. At the age of sixteen Agócs left home to represent the province of Ontario at Lester B. Pearson College of the Pacific, where she played guitar and sang in a Sonic Youth-inspired rock band whose members included the art curator Massimiliano Gioni. She then accepted a full scholarship to Sarah Lawrence College based on a visual art portfolio, changing her focus to music in her junior year. She attended the Juilliard School, where her principal composition teacher was Milton Babbitt, from 1998 through 2005, earning masters and doctoral degrees in music composition. She was a composition fellow at the Aspen Music Festival and School and the Tanglewood Music Center, where she held the ASCAP Leonard Bernstein Composer Fellowship in 2007.
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