Ryan Francesconi is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, filmmaker, and software developer based in Portland, Oregon. A graduate of the California Institute of the Arts, where he studied guitar under Miroslav Tadic, composition under Lucky Mosko and David Rosenboom, and programming with Tom Erbe, his musical work spans solo guitar, Bulgarian folk, electronic and orchestral composition, filmmaking, and adventure cycling.

As a performer, he is best known for his work with Joanna Newsom — serving as principal arranger and conductor on the triple album Have One on Me (2010) and contributing arrangements to Divers (2015), and touring as a central member of her live band at venues including Carnegie Hall, the Sydney Opera House, and the Royal Albert Hall. His solo recordings include Parables (2010), a solo acoustic guitar album recorded live with no overdubs, Road to Palios (2012), an album of duets with Mirabai Peart, Cold Moon (2015) with Alela Diane, and records by The Toids, Trio Mopmu, RF, and other monikers and collaborations.

Often referred to as a multi-instrumentalist, he is a specialist on the Bulgarian Tambura as well various other stringed things.

In 2025, he released OCVA (Oregon Cascades Volcanic Arc), a 28-minute film documenting a bikepacking traverse of the Oregon Cascades during wildfire season. The film, which he directed, scored, and narrated, was selected for the SUNCINE International Environmental Film Festival in Barcelona and won 2025's Best Cinematography/Editing from bikepacking.com. A prolific route creator and Ride with GPS ambassador, he has designed hundreds of mixed-terrain cycling routes across the Pacific Northwest.

Francesconi's software work runs parallel to his music. Between 1997 and 1999, while studying audio DSP programming with Tom Erbe at CalArts, he created Spongefork — one of the first applications built specifically for gesturally controlled electronic improvisation. Built on Tom Erbe's Pitchfork oscillators and later Phil Burk's JSyn synthesis engine, it was a softsynth, sampler, and live performance tool whose Theremin-like gestural interface made it an instrument in its own right. Spongefork won first prize at the 1999 International Musical Software Competition in Bourges, France, was reviewed in TapeOp, Electronic Musician, and Studio Voice, and evolved through three major versions — from Mac OS 7 through OS X — before going dormant in 2008. From 2016–2025 he co-founded and served as Head of Technology at Audio Design Desk (ADD), a metadata-powered DAW for automated sound design used by editors at Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon. ADD was named NAB Product of the Year (2023) and one of Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies in Film and TV.

He has now relaunched Spongefork as an independent software studio, building ShadowTag, a macOS application for audio metadata and sample library management, with more releases on the way.