NICOLE VIVIANE GAGNÉ was born in New York City on March 19, 1954, and is a graduate of Fordham University.
She is the co-author (with Tracy Caras) of Soundpieces: Interviews with American Composers (Scarecrow Press, 1982) and the author of Sonic Transports: New Frontiers in Our Music (de Falco Books, 1990), Soundpieces 2: Interviews with American Composers (Scarecrow Press, 1993), and Historical Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Classical Music (Rowman & Littlefield, Second Edition, 2019). A contributor to The New Grove II, she has written about music for BMI Music World, Op, Option, and newmusicbox.org; she has also lectured on music at Sarah Lawrence College, the University of Pittsburgh, the California Institute of the Arts, the University of San Francisco, and the main branch of the San Francisco Public Library. Her essay “The Beaten Path” (2004), a history of percussion in American music, won ASCAP’s Deems Taylor Award in 2004. She is the librettist and co-composer (with David Avidor) of the opera Agamemnon (1993), in which she also performed as a singer and instrumentalist; in 2019 she made a series of videos for the entire opera. She wrote and hosted the San Francisco radio show “A 21st-Century Guide to 20th-Century Music” from 2012 to 2018 on SFCR. Since 2024 she has been a guest host for Sarah Cahill’s “Revolutions Per Minute” shows on KALW.
She has written essays, reviews, and interviews relating to film for the periodicals Film Journal International, Cineaste, and Brutarian as well as wellesnet.com, ashadedviewonfashion.com, unicornbooty.com, fandor.com, and allmovie.com. Her collection of short fiction about the movies, Film Dreams, was published in 2024 by Dove’s Diner Inc.
She is the author of the one-act play Yet Being Unperfect, which premiered in New York City in 2003 as part of STAGES, the First National Transgender Theater Festival. An excerpt from her first full-length play, The Condemnation, starring and directed by Vera Beren, was performed as part of the One Woman Standing developmental theater series in New York City in 2007. She delivered a series of lectures and readings on American literature for the Palenville Branch Library in 2002–2003 and has spoken on transgender issues at Hudson Valley Community College, St. Joseph’s College, the CUNY Graduate Center, Berkeley College, and the College of St. Rose.
NICOLE V. GAGNÉ 