Rona Siddiqui

Position
Associate Professor
Faculty Bio E-Mail

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Rona Siddiqui is an award-winning composer and lyricist, orchestrator, and music director based in New York City. Her show Salaam Medina: Tales of a Halfghan, an autobiographical comedy about growing up bi-ethnic in America, had a developmental workshop at Playwrights Horizons in November 2019, while the concert it inspired, Rona Siddiqui: Halfghan on a Mission, was featured at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. In addition, Siddiqui composed the music for an original 20-minute musical about Afghanistan, The Tin, which was selected to be part of the Samuel French OOB Short Play Festival in 2012. Her musical Treasure in NYC (book and lyrics by Laura Kleinbaum), an immersive musical adventure for autistic children, has been produced at the Cell.

Over the course of her career, Siddiqui has been commissioned to write songs for Wicked's 16th Anniversary Commemoration, Flying Free, Broadway Inspirational Voices, the Civilians, and Pittsburgh CLO, among many others, as well as the web series Amateur Dicks. She has been a featured songwriter in concert venues such as 54 Below, Joe's Pub, and New York City Center. She has written original scores for plays including Middletown, The Vagina Monologues, The Good Person of Szechuan, The Clean House, and Love Song of J Robert Oppenheimer, and her music direction credits include A Strange Loop, Bella: An American Tall Tale, and Who's Your Baghdaddy: Or How I Started the Iraq War. 

Career Highlights
  • Music director for the Obie Award– and Pulitzer Prize–winning A Strange Loop
  • Orchestrator for Broadway Records, Broadway Backwards, National Alliance for Musical Theater, and Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera
  • One Good Day named as one of the Best New Musicals of 2014 by the Festival of New American Musicals
  • Named one of Broadway Women's Fund's Women to Watch in 2021
  • Recipient of the ASCAP Foundation/Max Dreyfus Scholarship 
Awards
  • Recipient of the ASCAP Harold Adamson Lyric Award
  • Recipient of the ASCAP Foundation Mary Rodgers/Lorenz Hart Award
  • Recipient of the 2020 Special Citations Obie Award for A Strange Loop
  • Recipient of the 2020 Jonathan Larson Grant from the American Theatre Wing
  • Recipient of the 2019 Billie Burke Ziegfeld Award 
Education
  • Master's degree, New York University, musical theater writing