Lustig's work crosses many genres, as composer, performer, producer, and bandleader.  From symphonic works to experimental opera, instrumental music, to alternative rock and electronic music, his music maintains an artistic and sonic signature across strikingly different forces, an emotional intensity not about loudness but often quiet and constant, with the New York Times hailing his sound as  "entrancing...surreally beautiful...ecstatic...rapturous."

While his early career was set in the world of Juilliard and Carnegie Hall, he has expanded steadily “downtown” and around the world, working with international musicians ranging from underground rockers to modular synthesists, jazzers, traditional folk instrumentalists, and classical virtuosi.   

His choral opera Semmelweis—a collaboration with writer Matthew Doherty based on the tragic story of the nineteenth-century obstetrician who discovered the devastating cause of one of history’s worst puerperal fever epidemics—was staged in a 2018 production by Hungarian director Martin Boross, in a co-production by the Bartok Plusz Opera Festival and Budapest Operetta theater, directed by Martin Boross. The production also toured throughout Hungary. In May of 2020, during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, SEMMELWEIS was streamed worldwide to raise funds for urgent humanitarian and research needs. The Washington Post praised its "compelling beauty and eerie prescience," and Lucid Culture called it “powerfully resonant…gripping…alternately austere and lustrous… otherworldly.” It received high praise in the European press as well, with Hungary’s Magyar Idők naming it “one of the best theatrical productions of recent years,” Papago calling it “…a spectacular project…a non-typical opera…outside of musical genre here in a particularly compelling way,” and Fidelio calling it “an unusual, convincing and imaginative work…floating…exciting and powerful,” and Italy’s Sipario praising “the seriousness of the musical argument…solid dramatic construct.”

In 2023 Lustig and co-producer Maximilien Hein began a project to reimagine the music of the opera as a concept album taking the form of a song cycle.  Released on Sono Luminus in 2026, Gramophone Magazine praised the album as "haunted…sublimely eclectic…a gorgeous, thoroughly original creation with the gravity of Dido’s Lament…presented in luminous, finely detailed sound.”  The album was also a 5-star Editors's Choice on AllMusic, who called it “a deeply affecting meditation…gorgeous…directly beautiful…unforced and intimate…compelling…rich polyphony…elegant construction.”

In 2020, with New York-based Italian artist Luigi Porto, he started the band Manicburg, which released its debut album in 2024, a subsequent live EP, many single videos, and continues to tour and record.   It's Psychedelic Baby Magazine calls Manicburg "a deeply personal fusion of post-punk, dream pop, and art rock…surreal compositional…mesmerizing soundscape.”

His latest solo album, WELCOME, due out in the autumn of 2026, takes his solo music again in the direction of alternative rock, with a lush electronic and compositional palette, exploring different angles of anxiety and fear in a dangerous world. 

Lustig is part of a growing scene of artists and musicians based in the far-northern neighborhoods of Manhattan, and hosts monthly music parties in his studio there.

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Beginning in 2012, a major effort for Ray has been making use of the internet to transcend barriers—of geography, nationality, culture, politics, conflict, accessibility, and resources. He envisions a world where musicians anywhere in the world and of any means can find ways to make music together over basic internet. As challenging and imperfect as this is, he believes that this medium can inspire new music specially suited to it; composers have always taken new inspirations from the spaces their music is created for. His 2013 work LATENCY CANONSbrought together American Composer Orchestra, live in Carnegie Hall in New York, with the Gildas Quartet, live at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, UK. His intent with the music was to not only allow for the internet’s imperfections (ie. delays) but to actually employ them to create a unique sound directly shaped by them. This technically challenging kind of music making opens up a whole world of collaborative needs and possibilities for artists of the future.

In response to the 2020 covid pandemic, he created CLOUDS IN SINGLE FILE, a work for live ensemble made up of individual musicians playing from their own quarantine places. He also engaged with artists in Italy, India, and Palestine on a live improvisational project United Sounds in the Dark that was presented by the Milan-based Palazzo Marino in Musica festival.

An active blogger-in-music, Lustig’s regular micro-composition series #composagrams has spawned a novel genre and pioneered use of social media feeds as a new 21st-century “concert hall”—an artistic space with its own creative benefits and boundaries. He was invited by TEDx to speak about his practice of looking to the constraints for his new inspirations.

Ray has produced innovative site-specific concerts in venues throughout New York, as well as for live online festivals.  Ray has worked closely with BLIND EAR, a composer collective including Jakub Ciupinski, Cristina Spinei, Ryan Francis, and Adam Schoenberg who “live-composed” music for live players by sending readable loops to individual musicians’ laptops.

Lustig’s music has been presented in venues ranging from New York City clubs and galleries to major concert halls, opera stages, and festivals around the world—Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, Budapest Operetta Theater, The Bartok Plusz Opera Festival, and the École Normale in Paris, the 92nd Street Y New York; Symphony Space, Merkin Hall, the Angel Orensanz Center, Le Poisson Rouge, the Stone, the Bowling Green New Music Festival, the Caramoor Festival, the European American Musical Alliance in Paris, the Norfolk Festival, Lyric Fest, the Fresh Ink Festival, the St. Louis Guitar Festival, the New York City Ballet’s Choreographic Institute, the New York Festival of Song’s NYFOS Next series, the Juilliard Beyond the Machine Festival, the Gershwin Hotel, Yale University, Columbia University, Barnard College, Bard College, Holy Cross College, the Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus in Schwandorfand Germany, Oberlin College and Conservatory, and more.

Residencies have included the Fresh Ink Festival, the Chamber Music Festival of Lexington, and the Bowling Green New Music Festival.

Ray’s work has been honored with the Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, ASCAP’s Rudolf Nissim Prize for his orchestral work UNSTUCK, the Aaron Copland Award from Copland House, the Juilliard Orchestra competition, the New Juilliard Ensemble competition.

Ray has received commission, grants, and performances from Budapest Operetta Theater, American Composers Orchestra, Grand Rapids Symphony, American Opera Projects, the Juilliard Symphony, the Bowling Green Philharmonia, Metropolis Ensemble, Town Hall Seattle, the Juilliard-Carnegie-Weill Academy, New York City Ballet’s Choreographic Institute, the American Music Center’s Live Music for Dance Project, the Alfred P.Sloan Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts, Seattle Town Music, Chamber Music Festival of Lexington, TENET Vocal Ensemble, the New Juilliard Ensemble, BLIND EAR, the Da Capo Chamber Players, Duo Noire, FLUTRONIX, NoiseBox Percussion Duo, Avian Music, Orchestra Insonica, Opera Grows in Brooklyn, Opera on Tap, counter)induction, tenor Nicholas Phan, cellist Joshua Roman, pianist Blair McMillen, and more.

A former researcher in molecular biology, Ray remains deeply inspired by science, nature, and the mind. He has been Artist in Residence with the Imagine Science Film Festival, and has helped to co-found and develop the Juilliard Weill Cornell Music and Medicine Initiative, a new collaborative project between The Juilliard School and Weill Cornell Medical College that explores the many intersections of music, the sciences, the mind, and the healing arts.

His music has been used for dance at the New York City Ballet’s Choreographic Institute, the Juilliard School’s Composers and Choreographers concert, and Barnard College’s Spring Dances concert, and he has collaborated with choreographers Yass Hakoshima, Peter Quantz, Melissa Barak, and Brynt Beitman.

He has scored two animated short films by writer-director-animator John Lustig.

Lustig’s teachers have included John Corigliano, Robert Beaser, Samuel Adler, Sebastian Currier, Jonathan Kramer, Derek Bermel, Philip Lasser, Pia Gilbert, Conrad Cummings, and Shirish Korde.

Born in Tokyo and raised in Queens, New York, Lustig received his B.A. from Holy Cross College, where he pursued interests in music and the sciences. He studied cell division, the cell skeleton, and cell polarity at Columbia University and Massachusetts General Hospital before beginning his graduate studies in composition at Juilliard, where he completed his MM and DMA degrees. He lives and works in Washington Heights, New York, and hosts monthly artist meetups with live performances in his studio.