Nicoletta Todesco is an Italian guitarist, composer, conductor, and singer. Through storytelling and composition, she looks for new ways to exalt the instrument and its relationship with the player, moving between original works, early music, and arrangements for both classical and electric guitar.

Her debut album, The Cockroach Diary (2025), is a song cycle of original compositions for voice and guitar (classical and electric), engineered by Grammy-nominated Jennifer Nulsen. The album is an exploration of artistic ambition, loneliness, and the creative impulse, unfolding over a night of imaginary conversation with a Periplaneta americana living in the crevices of the artist’s subconscious. Fanfare Magazine called it “a genre-defying act of storytelling.”

Niki, as her friends call her, left home at 14 to study at the Conservatory of Trento, where she emerged as a talented young guitarist with awards at national and international competitions. She went on to the Regondi Academy in Milan and completed a Master’s in guitar performance at the Conservatory of Bologna. In 2017, seeking her own voice as a composer and performer, she moved to the United States to study under Benjamin Verdery at the Yale School of Music.

Nicoletta has been an invited artist at the Long Island Guitar Festival, the New York Guitar Seminar, Sydney Guitar Festival and Taranaki Guitar Festival, among others, and performed in solo recitals across the United States, Italy, Mexico, Australia, and New Zealand. She is a founding member of the Italian contemporary music collective 0crediti, and has performed with NOVUS NY, Trinity Church Wall Street’s contemporary orchestra, and with Heartbeat Opera, including its production of Lady M, which the New York Times called “flat-out brilliant.” She also performs in a duo with flutist Laura Elena Gracia Guzmán and in a trio with soprano Emily Donato and flutist Helen Park.

Nicoletta holds a Master’s in musicology from the University of Bologna, with a research internship at CENIDIM in Mexico City. She has taught at institutions in both Italy and the U.S., and as a guitar instructor and composer has contributed to publications for Classical Guitar Academy, where she served as production manager and continues to teach. Her composition for four guitars, Picking Berries in the Haunted Forest, won first prize at the 2022 Austin Classical Guitar Composition Competition.

Nicoletta is the director of the New York City Guitar Orchestra and artist liaison at Augustine Strings. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.