Sabrina Peña Young, the daughter of Dominican and Cuban parents, grew up in South Florida during the 1980s. Starting her creative journey as a musician, Young spent her teen years and much of her college life performing in various orchestras, alternative bands, and avant-garde ensembles. While at the University of South Florida in Tampa in 2000, Sabrina Peña Young became involved with SYCOM (Systems Complex for the Recording and Performing Arts), an experimental enclave of composers and media artists. She abandoned the drumsticks for a computer mouse. She worked with Emmy-winning director Charles Lyman at Atlantic Productions before leaving Tampa to study music technology at Florida International University in Miami, Florida, in 2003.
Over the next several years Young explored media and music, writing music and creating zombie effects for indie B horror films, composing complex electronic media works like World Order #5, writing for Kalup Linzy in his film Conversations wid de churn II and studying film for a year at Florida International University in Miami where she premiered works like A Portrait of Urban Life at Art Basil Miami and Arts Miami before dropping out in 2006 to teach art to homeless children with the nationally recognized ArtREACH program.
Combining her love of music and love of science fiction imagery, in 2011 Young received a New Genre Award from the International Alliance for Women in Music for her futuristic multimedia oratorio Creation. In 2012 Young composed scores for Emmy-winning Rob Cabrera‘s animated short Monica (2012) and Sean Fleck’s time-lapse film Americana. Wanting to explore film further, Sabrina Peña Young began production on Libertaria: The Virtual Opera, a science fiction machinima opera produced entirely online. In 2013 Libertaria: The Virtual Opera was premiered in Lake Worth, Florida. In 2014, Young gave a TED Talk at TEDxBuffalo on “Singing Geneticists and EPIC Machinima Opera”.
Libertaria was presented at the Holland Animation Film Festival, Opera America in NYC, and TEDxBuffalo, as well as online and throughout the United States. In 2015 Young published her debut novel Libertaria: Genesis as an addendum to her groundbreaking opera and collaborated with composer Lee Scott on his interactive social media opera The Village. Young is currently writing her third novel in the Libertaria Chronicles series and is in pre-production for her second feature-length sci-fi animated film. In 2018 Young was a produced The Noise Within and Welcome to Space Force as part of her Buffalo Indie Filmmaker Boot Camp, six weeks to write, shoot, and edit a short film. Young was on the crew for Aaron Webb's Echo Falls, the Fearless and Resilient documentary, and won an award for her score for Grace McAlliaster's "The Present and the Passed".
Young is a member of the New York Women Composer’s Association, the International Alliance for Women in Music, Vox Novus, and the Buffalo Movie and Video Makers.