Helena Michelson completed her undergraduate studies in Music at the University of California, Berkeley and holds a doctorate in composition and theory from the University of California, Davis. First trained as a pianist, she studied piano with Mack McCray at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and, in masterlasses, with Richard Goode and Awadagin Pratt. She has studied composition, among others, with Olly Wilson, Cindy Cox, Jeffrey Miller, Pablo Ortiz, and, in masterclasses, with Louis Andriessen, Martin Bresnick, Mario Davidovsky, Eric Chasalow, Philippe Leroux, Bernard Rands, and Judith Shatin. She has been a participating composer in MusicX, a festival of new music at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music in 2003, 2005, and again, in 2007, an invited composer at Domaine Forget in Quebec (2004), and a composition fellow at the Composer's Conference at Wellesley College (2003) and the Ernest Bloch Composers' Symposium (2004). Her recent awards include three honorable mentions (2001, 2005, 2006) and a Grand Prize from the Composers Guild Composition Contest (2004), the Judith Lang Zaimont Prize in the IAWM's Search for New Music (2005), and a commission through the American Composers Forum-Community Partners Program (2006).