That focus on cross-pollination among disciplines comes out of Prestini’s own artistic experience, as well. Collaboration has been a touchstone of her career: While still a student at Juilliard, she launched the multimedia performance group VisionIntoArt (VIA), which she still runs, and which remains the primary outlet for her own work. As she explains, Juilliard’s composition program was rather conservative, and both as a woman in the male-dominated course, and as a composer who desired to create multimedia work, she found herself an outlier. The only solution, it seemed to her at the time, was to “get entrepreneurial,” and invent opportunities to stage her large-scale, path-breaking shows. The first big one, she recalls, was “A Tough Line,” an immersive theatrical experience featuring music, video and live actors, based on the siege of the Moscow Theater by Chechen separatists in 2002.

“That production was definitely a breakthrough,” Prestini says. “But still, even with the amazing response to that show, and the opportunities that came in its wake, my career was on a slow burn. I never stopped feeling like I had to hustle to make my work, and get it out there," she says. That's why "when I talk to artists now, I’m always telling them—that’s the deal. Don’t just wait for the opportunities to come to you. Create them. Create the context for the work you want to do.”

“There are two ways of looking at that,” Prestini adds. "You could see it as a hardship, or you could choose to feel empowered by the idea that you can make your own world.”

Prestini has done an impressive job of world-making: She makes regular appearances, these days, on lists of “world’s best composers,” her work is performed at blue chip venues such as the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Carnegie Hall, and her collaborators of late include novel Jonathan Safran Foer and Robert Wilson, demigod of the avant-garde theatre scene. She’s also found herself one of the very few women heading up a major arts institution—and the only working artist tasked with running one. She sees her role at National Sawdust as part of her world-making project, too.

“I’m still creating my own context,” she explains. “I’m an artist, and of course, it serves me for the scene I’m a part of to be dynamic and exciting. Not only because that’s creatively invigorating, but because a dynamic and exciting music scene attracts a dynamic, excited audience. National Sawdust isn’t just about incubating artists. It’s about incubating a new culture, too.”