The International Alliance for Women in Music (IAWM) is thrilled to announce the winners of its 2026 Search for New Music Competition. The competition recognizes the accomplishments of IAWM member composers and fosters IAWM’s goal of increasing awareness of the musical contributions of women. IAWM hopes that performers around the world will see this as a resource for their own concert programming.

2026 Katy Abbott Prize 

Sponsored by Australian composer, Katy Abbott, for a large chamber work (9+ instruments) and/or orchestral works; may include works featuring soloists (vocal or instrumental).

Winner: Jessie Leov, New Zealand – Speculations on a Rainbow

Jessie Leov is an award-winning composer of New Zealand and Australian heritage. With a diverse practice as a music-maker, Jessie’s work traverses classical and popular music, including cross-disciplinary collaboration across the arts. Her music reflects a deep curiosity about the world around her as well as responding to other art forms such as poetry and visual art. Jessie was a composer fellow at the 2024 Edward T. Cone Composition Institute at Princeton University, and at the 2025 Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival in MA, USA. She was Composer-in-Residence for the NZSO National Youth Orchestra in 2024, and is the recipient of a 2022 APRA Professional Development Award. Jessie’s collaborative album, “Earthworks”, with sonic artist Garling Wu, is due for release in May 2026. A collaboration spanning multiple continents, time zones, and years, “Earthworks” is an album of organic textures, delicate granular gestures, and surreal sonic spaces, responding to their changing environments as nomadic artists. Their work, “Sounding Bell”, premiered in London in 2024 and was showcased at the 2025 MANIFEST:IO Symposium for New Media and Electronic Art in Berlin. 2026 also brings collaborations with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, Omega Ensemble, and Australian National Academy of Music.

Celebrating the work of internationally acclaimed Aotearoa New Zealand artist Judy Millar, Speculations on a Rainbow is a response to Millar’s The Rainbow Loop. Millar’s large-scale gestural work, a long looping painting on wood and canvas, forms a twisted coil that seeks to ‘interrupt and invade’ the space it occupies. Drawing on the duality of Millar’s sweeping strokes of vibrant colour, offset by stark monochromatic landscapes, Speculations on a Rainbow weaves its way through a shifting canvas of stability and turbulence, stillness and motion, offering a brief glimpse into the ‘temporary twisted world’ of The Rainbow Loop. Commissioned in 2023 by New Zealand Symphony Orchestra for the NZSO National Youth Orchestra.