Betty Olivero is a contemporary Israeli composer, who has lived during most of her career in Florence, Italy.
She studied at the Rubin Academy of Music, at Tel Aviv University and Bar-Ilan University with Itzhak Sadai and Leon Shidlowsky, and at Yale University where her teachers included Jacob Druckman and Bernard Rands. In 1982 a Leonard Bernstein Scholarship enabled her to work at Tanglewood with Luciano Berio, with whom she continued to study in Italy (1983-86).
In Olivero's works, traditional and ethnic music materials are processed using western contemporary compositional techniques; traditional melodies and texts undergo processes of development, adaptation, transformation, assimilation, resetting and re-composition, to the point of assuming new forms in different contexts. These processes touch on wide and complex areas of contrast, such as east and west, holy and secular, traditional and new.
Olivero was awarded the Fromm Award by the Fromm Music Foundation (USA, 1986), the Koussevitzky Award by the Koussevitzky Music Foundation (USA, 2000), the Prime Minister's Prize (Israel, 2001), the Rosenblum Award for the Performing Arts (Israel, 2003), the Landau Award for the Performing Arts (Israel, 2004) and the ACUM prize for Life Achievements (Israel, 2004).
Olivero is currently living in Israel. She is a mother of two children and an associate professor of composition at the Music Department in Bar-Ilan University. Between 2004-2008 Olivero was composer-in-residence for the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra.