Born in Mexico City, Ana Lara attended the National Conservatory of Music, where her teachers included Mario Lavista and Daniel Catán; she also studied at CENIDIM with Federico Ibarra. Her postgraduate work was with Zbigniew Rudzinski and Wlodzimierz Kotonski at the Warsaw Academy of Music, thanks to a Mexican-Polish study grant. She received her MA in Ethnomusicology at the University of Maryland in 2004.

Ana Lara is an active cultural promoter, has also collaborated in various musical magazines, and produces a program at the University Radio (Radio UNAM) devoted to contemporary music since 1989. In 2000 she was a Latin Grammy Nominee for Best Classical Album’s Producer.

Ana Lara is the artistic director and the founder of the International Festival Música y Escena (www.musicayescena.org) since 1998 which obtained the Award of the Mexican Union of Critics of Theater and Music (2001). She was also the Artistic Director of Puebla Instrumenta Verano 2004, a Summer Course for young players (www.instrumenta.org). Currently is the artistic producer of Forum Universal de las Culturas Monterrey 2007.

She has extensively given seminars about XX Century Music and Latin American Music. She regularly teaches composition, history of music and musical analysis.

Her own compositions - ranging from solo pieces to orchestral works - have been performed throughout Europe, Japan as well as in the USA, Central and South America, and her native country. She was composer in residence of the National Symphony Orchestra from 1993 to 1994. In 1990 she won the Mexican Ministry of Culture’s grant for young creators and later the three year grant for creators (Sistema Nacional de Creadores 1994-1997 and 1998-2001, 2005-2008) as well as the U.S./Canada/Mexico Creative Artists’ Residency Program Grant (1997) and the Bellagio Artistic Residency (2000).

At the moment she is the Artistic Director of the Performiing Artes programming for the Universal Forum of Cultures, Monterrey 2007.

Works:
Angels of Fire and Ice, for orchestra; Bhairay, for string quartet; Aulos, for wind quintet; Requiem, for chorus a cappella; Toward the Night, for flute; Ícarus, for flute; Koaia, for cello; 8 Haiku Poems, for guitar.