Photo credit: Josy Gonzalo

A 2026 Guggenheim Fellow, Mathew Arrellín (pronounced: A-rre-yín) is a composer and cellist from El Paso, Texas, currently based in Chicago. 

His music has been performed by the Mivos Quartet, Third Coast Percussion, ~Nois, Fonema Consort, Ensemble Dal Niente, the Low Frequency Trio, Dalia Chin, Ben Roidl-Ward, and the Chicago Composers Orchestra, among others. His work spans solo, chamber, and orchestral formats and has been presented at festivals and institutions across the United States and abroad, including VIPA, June in Buffalo, SCI National Conference, and Foro Internacional de Música Nueva.

Since childhood, he has practiced drawing and painting alongside his music and naturally draws on visual art as a compositional inspiration, both in the creative process and in search of conceptual frameworks. For example, his flute concerto "Overpainted Photographs" takes its title and conceptual point of departure from Gerhard Richter's series of the same name and attempts to answer the question of how to “overpaint” a sonic memory in a piece of music.

He is the recipient of a 2023 General Commission from the Barlow Endowment for Musical Composition, a finalist for the Rome Prize in 2025, two William T. Faricy Awards for excellence in composition from Northwestern University, and Illinois Arts Council grants in support of new works.

He holds a PhD in Music Composition and Technology from Northwestern University (2022), where he studied with Jay Alan Yim, Alex Mincek, and Hans Thomalla, and a bachelor's degree in theory/composition and cello performance from the University of New Mexico (2016), where he studied cello with David Schepps and composition with José-Luis Hurtado.

He has taught courses in theory, ear training, composition, and an interdisciplinary course of his own design in music and the visual arts at Northwestern University. He has also hosted his own masterclasses and workshops in composition outside of traditional academic contexts. In the fall of 2025, he stepped away from teaching at NU to focus more fully on composing and spending time with his wife and two children.