Ashi Day is a composer and educator whose vocally-driven music explores unconventional intersections between music and theater; using the voice as a compositional tool; strategic use of humor and absurdity; and considering the experience of the performer as much as the audience. She frequently writes pieces designed to expand the canon in ways that allow performers to play against stereotypes and that bring a theatrical lens to instrumental performance. Common themes include who is able to move freely through the world, pressures that influence people to act for or against their stated values, and interconnectedness and sustainability. She also writes a lot of songs about animals.

In addition to writing choral music and art song, Ashi writes chamber operas that explore, in some way, who gets to move freely through the world and who does not. Usually working as her own librettist, her operas are praised for their catchy melodies and idiomatic vocal writing. Waking the Witch, a one-act immersive opera for solo countertenor (or mezzo-soprano) and Pierrot ensemble, sees the audience as an accused witch being interrogated by a 16th-Century witchfinder, and uses a libretto drawn from the words of historical witch hunters as well as modern-day rhetoric that is eerily similar. The Fishwife, an ensemble-driven comic operetta commissioned by Maryland Opera Studio, reimagines of the Grimm fairytale “The Fisherman and His Wife,” as playful exploration of wanting: greed, ambition, satisfaction, and more (and includes fake Baroque arias and sea shanties). Her micro-operas include For Whom the Dog Tolls, in which a solo soprano plays a Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever, a rare hunting breed that can lure ducks to their demise; The Green Child, for soprano and clarinet (the clarinetist playing the titular character, with optional staging included), based on the legend of the green children of Woolpit in which two girls save each other from dangers physical and existential; and Fae-Feral Child (with librettist Cilff Hoitt-Lange), commissioned by No Divide KC as part of their Come as You Are: Vulnerability in the Concert Space), in which a bullied child finds new beginnings through an encounter with the faefolk.

Ashi’s works have been performed by Lyric Opera of Kansas City with No Divide KC; Renegade Opera; Opera Ithaca; Hartford Opera Theater; Fresh Squeezed Opera Company; KC VITAS; Juventas New Music Ensemble; Calliope’s Call; Cappella Clausura; Phoenix Chamber Choir; A Notion, A Scream; StageFree; Metropolitan Master Chorale of Los Angeles, Artifice, Ensemble Lyrae, Connecticut Yankee Chorale, and as well as a by number of university and church choirs, singers in recital, and more. She has been commissioned by ensembles and organizations including The Thirteen, Maryland Opera Studio, Whistling Hens, Little City Concerts, Cantate Chamber Singers, the Boston Cecilia, PERI Trio, and more. She has also been a festival composer at Choral Arts Initiative’s PREMIERE|Project Festival, Denison TUTTI, New Music on the Bayou, NEO Voice Festival, Women Composers Festival of Hartford, Music by Women, University of North Georgia’s ROCC, District New Music Coalition’s New Music DC, Opera from Scratch, and more. In devised theater, she collaborated with artists of various disciplines to co-create Narrative the Build We for Cultural DC’s Source Festival and Being Moss as part of I Thought the Earth Remembered Me with banished? productions for the Capital Fringe Festival. Her music can be heard on Whistling Hens’ album, Reacting to the Landscape, and KC VITAS’ When We Arrive at Home (Neuma Records).

Ashi has been named a DC Arts and Humanities Fellow for multiple years alongside artists of all mediums “whose artistic excellence significantly contributes to the District of Columbia as a world class cultural capital.” She was a 2025 Come As You Are fellow with No Divide KC and Lyric Opera of Kansas City, in which she was commissioned to create a new micro-opera for youth and family audiences. She was a 2022 Opera America Discovery Grant for Women Composers awardee for Waking the Witch. Ashi has also won prizes in VocalArts DC and Sparks and Wiry Cries’ SongSLAM DC, the Sewanee Church Conference’s FYFE Choral Composition Competition, and the New York Treble Singers Composition Competition.

Ashi earned a B.M. and M.M. in Composition respectively from Bucknell University and Westminster Choir College. Composition teachers include William Duckworth, Jackson Hill, Stefan Young, and Joel Phillips. As an educator, Ashi spent five years teaching elementary music and language arts in south Florida, during which time she also studied improv theater and classical voice. She then earned an Ed.M. in Arts in Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she was named an Urban Scholars Fellow for her work in arts education. For over a decade she worked in as an arts administrator managing education programs at the Kennedy Center and the Washington National Opera that created opportunities for people of all ages to experience, explore, learn through, and train in music and opera. As a soprano, she is a professional church musician and an excellent partner for singing rounds on car trips. She resides in Washington, DC, with her husband and her dog/muse, Oliver.