Beth Morrison Projects has announced the finalists of its “BMP: Next Gen” competition.

The winners include Elizabeth Gartman and Niloufar Nourbakhsh. Each winner will be awarded a $5,000 commission for the second round competition in which the two will present an original 30-minute composition next year. The winner will then receive a full commission for an evening-length work which will be produced and world premiered with Beth Morrison Projects.

Gartman is a composer / soprano who won the Carl Kanter Prize for Orchestral Composition at the Manhattan School of Music; she was also the a finalist in the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award and won the Elziabeth Meier Frauenhoffer Memorial Award in 2019. Among her compositions is the opera “The New Motive Power” written by Susan Bywaters and “IN This Moment (I Choose),” written for solo piano.

Nourbakhsh is a pianist and composer who was a 2019 recipient of Opera America’s Discovery Grant. Her compositions include the opera “We the Innumerable” as well as the song cycle “Darkness of the Womb” for soprano and vocoder.