Paola Bonora teaches flute at the Conservatorio “G. Cantelli” of Novara and is the flute section coordinator in the Asian Youth Orchestra at the Hong Kong Academy.

Born in Milan (Italy) in 1965, at the age of ten she falls in love with the flute while attending a theater class. She decides to study music at the Milan Conservatory as a pupil of Gabriele Gallotta and graduates as a flautist in 1985. That same year she wins a grant from the Foreign Affairs Ministry and moves to Paris to study at the Conservatoire National Superiéur as a student of Alain Marion and Raymond Guiot.

In 1987 she becomes first flute for the Italian Youth Orchestra.

From the very beginning, in Paris, she collaborates with Vinko Globokar, Michel Portal, Diego Masson and various other groundbreaking contemporary-music groups such as 2E2M, Musique Vivante, Ensemble Intercontemporain, and IRCAM.

She will crown her studies by winning the Premier Prix for both flute and chamber music.

Paola begins her professional life playing in France for the Orchestra De Paris, the Opera De Lyon, and the Opera De Paris. In 1990 she contributes to record Jean-Claude Petit’s Oscar-winning score for Cyrano De Bergerac.

In 1995 she leaves Paris and becomes the first flute of the Galicia Symphonic Orchestra in Spain.

She wins the audition for the Chamber Orchestra of Europe and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra.

She also wins several trials as principal flute in other major European orchestras like the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Throughout the 1990s Paola takes part as principal flute in major European music festivals such as the Ravenna Festival, Ferrara Musica, London Proms, the Salzburg Festival, and the Lucerne Festival.

In 2000 she moves back to Italy joining Maggio Musicale Fiorentino as principal flute and collaborating with other major lyrical Italian institutions. At the same time she begins her most experimental years.

Playing with the Divertimento Ensemble and Agon Group, in 2009 she wins the “Best Event Award” with the spectacle War of Sounds created for a major exhibition on Futurism at the Palazzo Reale of Milan (Italy). That same year she begins exploring new horizons by studying the traverso flute with Marcello Gatti at the Accademia di Musica Antica of Milan.

Thanks to her solid French-school technique, and a newly found pioneering vocation, Paola begins to play using only historical instruments and thereby exploring the traverso most extreme mechanization up until the pre-Bohem era. Along these lines of research she participates in a Sky documentary on the Ensemble Silete Venti performing Hendel, and she plays for the parisian Le Siecles Orchestra with Francois Xavier Roth to record Stravinsky played with original instruments.

From 2016, following her original passion for archeology, Paola starts her new research on the flute origins and begins to study Ars Nova, transcribing and decoding 14th Century manuscripts and working on recreating a 14th century flute through iconographical sources, with the intent of bringing back the medieval traverso as a protagonist of Trecento music culture.

In 2017 she collaborates with the “Barocchisti” of Diego Fasolis and participates in the Scala Barocca of Milano, executing music played exclusively with historical instruments.

In 2018 she joins “Gli Originali” to play Gaetano Donizetti’s operas with original 19th-century instruments, for the Donizetti Festival of Bergamo, and to contribute to restore the original sounds of the Italian lyric repertoire with conductors like Rinaldo Alessandrini and Stefano Montanari.

In 2022 Paola finally records a collections of 14th Century ballads by Francesco Landini with the Ensemble Voltastella. Some of these ballads have remained unperformed for almost 700 years.

She has recorded for Chandos, Naxos, Deutsche Harmonia Mundi, Dynamic.