The graduate program in Composition at UC Berkeley strives to give space to the cultural leaders of the future – composers, composer-performers, improvisers, sound artists, and composers with special emphasis in technology. We prepare students for professional lives as practicing artists and as academics. Every student in the program receives a full fellowship that includes a stipend with no teaching responsibilities in the first year, a teaching fellowship (Graduate Students Instructor) until they dissertate, and a one-year dissertation completion fellowship (if qualification exams are passed in normative time). Other funding opportunities include possible summer funding, competitive composition awards (e.g. the Ladd Prize for a composer to spend a year in Paris), and Graduate Student Researcher positions.<br><br>The works of the composition faculty (Franck Bedrossian, Edmund Campion, Carmine-Emanuele Cella, Cindy Cox, Myra Melford, and Ken Ueno) are heard regularly around the world, and their presence is deeply embedded into the cultural life of the San Francisco Bay area. Our graduate composers have regular opportunities to hear their music performed by the professional Eco Ensemble through the Berkeley New Music Project (BNMP), conducted by David Milnes. In partnership with the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) directed by Edmund Campion, students may work with innovative and unique technologies for human/computer interaction, assisted composition and orchestration, advanced real time sound transformations, instrument augmentation and much more.