English composer Kate Whitley gained acclaim while still in her 20s for original works, performances of which she funded inventively with what has been called a do-it-yourself ethic.

Whitley was born in 1989. As a young person she studied piano, but never envisioned any interaction between the world of classical music she thus encountered and the pop and electronic dance music she heard on a daily basis. Winning admission to competitive piano courses, she encountered for the first time other teens who were enthusiastic about classical music, but still found the music unaccepted among her usual circle of friends.

Whitley resolved to bridge that gap, and even before graduating from Cambridge University in 2011, she had been hailed by the Times of London as part of "a bold new breed." A few months after her graduation, she and Christopher Stark founded the Multi-Story Orchestra, an ensemble headquartered and giving performances in a disused parking garage in southeast London's Peckham neighborhood. Awards from the Sky Academy Futures Fund (2013) and the Borletti-Buitoni Trust (2014) made wider performances of her work possible, but she continued to seek out non-traditional venues, collaborating with the Rambert Dance Company (where she was Music Fellow in 2013-2014) and the Kettles Yard Art Gallery (where she was New Music Programmer in 2015). Whitley has written several important works for children's choir, one of which, Alive, won a 2015 British Composers Award. She told the BBC Music Magazine that she followed Benjamin Britten in this regard: "I've always been inspired by Britten's use of young people as performers, as singers or players. Noye's Fludde has an amazing integration of professional and young performers. That's always an inspiration." Other works for young performers included the opera Paws and Padlocks, about two children trapped in a zoo overnight.

Whitley's debut album, I Am I Say, appeared on the NMC label in 2017; its title work is also for children, but the rest consisted of abstract chamber music. Her other projects that year included Speak Out, a setting of Pakistani women's education activist and Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai's 2013 speech at the United Nations. Whitley lives in South London. ~ James Manheim, Rovi