Caroline Shaw is a musician who moves among roles, genres, and mediums, trying to imagine a world of sound that has never been heard before but has always existed. She works often in collaboration with others, as producer, composer, violinist, and vocalist. Caroline is the recipient of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Music, several Grammy awards, an honorary doctorate from Yale, and a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. This year’s projects include the score to “Fleishman is in Trouble” (FX/Hulu), vocal work with Rosalía (MOTOMAMI), the score to Josephine Decker’s “The Sky Is Everywhere” (A24/Apple), music for the National Theatre’s production of “The Crucible” (dir. Lyndsey Turner), Justin Peck’s “Partita” with NY City Ballet, a new stage work “LIFE” (Gandini Juggling/Merce Cunningham Trust), the premiere of “Microfictions Vol. 3” for NY Philharmonic and Roomful of Teeth, a live orchestral score for Wu Tsang’s silent film “Moby Dick” co-composed with Andrew Yee, two albums on Nonesuch (“Evergreen” and “The Blue Hour”), the score for Helen Simoneau’s dance work “Delicate Power”, tours of Graveyards & Gardens (co-created immersive theatrical work with Vanessa Goodman), and tours with So Percussion featuring songs from “Let The Soil Play Its Simple Part” (Nonesuch), amid occasional chamber music appearances as violist (Chamber Music Society of Minnesota, La Jolla Music Society). Caroline has written over 100 works in the last decade, for Anne Sofie von Otter, Davóne Tines, Yo Yo Ma, Renée Fleming, Dawn Upshaw, LA Phil, Philharmonia Baroque, Seattle Symphony, Cincinnati Symphony, Aizuri Quartet, The Crossing, Dover Quartet, Calidore Quartet, Brooklyn Rider, Miro Quartet, I Giardini, Ars Nova Copenhagen, Ariadne Greif, Brooklyn Youth Chorus, Britt Festival, and the Vail Dance Festival. She has contributed production to albums by Rosalía, Woodkid, and Nas. Her work as vocalist or composer has appeared in several films, tv series, and podcasts including The Humans, Bombshell, Yellowjackets, Maid, Dark, Beyonce’s Homecoming, Tár, Dolly Parton’s America, and More Perfect. Her favorite color is yellow, and her favorite smell is rosemary.

Bora Yoon is a Korean-American composer, vocalist, and sound artist who conjures audiovisual soundscapes using digital devices, voice, and instruments from a variety of cultures and historical centuries to formulate a storytelling through music, movement and sound. Featured on the front-page of the Wall-Street Journal, WIRE magazine, TED and the National Endowment for the Arts podcast for her use of unusual instruments and everyday found objects as music, she evokes what George Lewis describes as “a kind of sonic memory garden” – using voice, viola, Tibetan singing bowls, vocoder, Bible pages, bike bells, turntable, walkie-talkies, chimes, water, and electronics.  Yoon has presented her work at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, BAM, Visiones Sonoras (Mexico), TED Conferences, Festival of World Cultures (Poland), MADE Festival (Sweden) and provided the live score for Haruki Murakami’s Wind Up Bird Chronicle– an interdisciplinary theatre adaptation, co-commissioned by Asia Society, Baryshnikov Art Center, Edinburgh International Arts Festival, and Singapore Arts Festival.  Yoon has written for ensembles So Percussion, Alarm Will Sound, SAYAKA Ladies Consort of Tokyo, New Jersey Symphony Orchestra, Grammy-nominated Voices of Ascension Chorus; with select works published by Boosey & Hawkes, Guild of Carillonneurs of North America, W.W. Norton, and the Journal of Popular Noise. Yoon’s music has been featured on NPR, Jad Abumrad’s Dolly Parton’s America podcast,  in addition to Apple TV+’s PACHINKO, based on the NY Times bestselling novel by Min Jin Lee.  Yoon’s  last 2-person opera Sunken Cathedral (2015) premiered at NYC’s PROTOTYPE Festival co-produced by Beth Morrison Projects and HERE Arts Center, and is currently producing and developing her next Asian opera, based on South Korean cinema thriller directed by Park Chan-Wook, Handmaiden, in addition to the premiere of new evening-length multimedia performance work SPKR SPRKL for interactive gestural performance, wavefield synthesis, and spatial sound at the Experimental Media Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at RPI in Troy (Premiere: March 2023).

For more info, visit: http://www.borayoon.com

[photo credit: Ryan Lash]

Mantra Percussion, Inc. is a future-focused arts organization committed to a lasting influence on percussion music, developing unique and equitable music communities through the art of percussion, fostering high-level musicianship for underserved and underrepresented youth in new music, and engaging audiences by challenging the standard concert format through evening-length events that look toward a grander artistic vision.

The flagship ensemble, Mantra Percussion, founded in 2009, has been featured around the world and has commissioned/premiered over 70 new works for percussion ensemble. Their aim is to bring to life new works for percussion by living composers and creators from across the social spectrum — establishing long-lasting relationships with collaborators. From their inception they have almost exclusively performed works written specifically as commissions for the group. They travel around the block and around the world as ambassadors of their repertoire, committed to giving dozens of performances of the works they’ve proudly commissioned.

Christa Van Alstine began her musical life in the great plains of Saskatchewan, Canada. She currently lives in New York City where she is on faculty at the United Nations International School.

After studying at the Royal Conservatory’s Glenn Gould School in Toronto, and performing in Canada's National Academy Orchestra, Christa moved to New York for graduate school at Stony Brook University. She dedicates her time to collaborating with ensembles, performers, and composers. Christa is the clarinetist with Ipse, bass clarinetist with Hotel Elefant, and has performed and collaborated in NYC and abroad with Mantra Percussion, Wet Ink, Beth Morrison Projects, A Far Cry, Talea, ICE, Either/Or, Red Light New Music, Iktus Percussion, Ascolta, and Toca Loca.

Coco Elysses, a modern day renaissance woman hails from Robbins, Illinois and is a producer, musician, actress, voice-over artist, screenwriter and poet. She is the Chair of the 56 year old venerable AACM (Association for the Advancement of  Creative Musicians). During their second season, she was a featured musician in the critically claimed FOX drama Empire. 

In 2014, Coco was a semi-finalist in Lifetime Television Unscripted Development Pipeline. Coco’s voice can be heard at the Adler Planetarium in the instillation, Skywatchers of Africa. Coco’s voice can also be heard in, Saint’s Row video game, EverQuest II and Watchdogs. In 2018 she won the ALTA Award for Best Original Music in a Play and the 2019 non-equity Jeff Award for Best Original Music in a Play for Tilikum, the first for an African American woman. Coco composed music and performed in Baltimore Center Stage’s touring mobile unit in Antigone as Tiresias. 

In 2015 Coco was a featured actress in George E. Lewis’ film, Afterword and in the opera of the same name at The Museum of Contemporary Art. She was also in two exhibits, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the AACM (The Association for the  Advancement of Creative Musicians) at The DuSable Museum of African American History and the Museum of Contemporary Art. She performed at the Frankfurt, Germany Jazz Festival with Generation Now of the AACM and at the Made in Chicago Jazz Festival in Poznan, Poland with Voice Heard – a collective of women musicians of the AACM. Coco was a featured actress on Chicago PD and a  featured musician on Chicago Med. 

She recently appeared in the Midwest premier of Detroit 67’ at Northlight Theatre directed by Ron O.J. Parsons.  

Coco was also a featured musician in the book, Black Women and Music: More than The Blues, documenting historical female musicians. Coco performed with the Great Black Music Ensemble of the AACM in Pisa, Italy for The Insolent Noise Festival, at Millennium Park Chicago, The Chicago Blues Festival for the Chicago Jazz Festival. She has also performed with Renee Baker’s Chicago Modern Orchestra Project. She also performed with Hypnotic Brass Ensemble. She was a featured artist in Taiko Legacy 8, 10 & 11 at the Museum of Contemporary Art with Tatsu Aoki, and  Tsukasa Taiko, Miyumi Project at the Hyde Park Jazz Festival. Coco’s poetry is  featured in 99 New Poems: A Contemporary Anthology. A few of her noted recordings  were in Chile, South America, with Raiza, on their CD, Latin Soul-EMI and Nicole  Mitchell’s Africa Rising, Skylanding- The music of Yoko Ono by the Miyumi Project.  Raw and Alive 1 & 2- Miyumi Project 2018, The Best of Miyumi Project 2020,  Resurrection Suite with Carlos Pride and Ben Lamar Gay. Coco is a member of  AFTRA-SAG, AEA, AACM and the AFM.

Lainie Fefferman makes music by putting dots on lines, drawing curves in software, writing code in boxes, and finding new and surprising ways to wiggle her vocal chords. Her most recent commissions for the creation of original works have been from Recap Quartet, Greg Oakes, JACK Quartet, Aaron Larget-Caplan, Ensemble Decipher, Tenth Intervention, Sō Percussion, Make Music New York, Experiments in Opera, ETHEL, Kathleen Supové, TILT Brass, James Moore, Eleonore Oppenheim, and Dither. Her one-woman voice & electronics feminist song performance project "White Fire," an electroacoustic meditation on the heroines of the Hebrew Bible, premiered at Merkin Hall in 2016 and she has been tinkering and touring it internationally ever since. She is a co-founder and director of New Music Gathering, an annual conference/festival hybrid event for the international New Music Community. She had a wonderful time getting her doctorate in composition from Princeton University and is a programming/performing member of Princeton-based laptop ensemble Sideband. She currently teaches and advises a fabulous bunch of music makers as a professor of Music & Technology at Stevens Institute of Technology and recently concluded her time as artist in residence at Nokia Bell Labs. For more info, visit: http://lainiefefferman.com

Praised as “one of the most exciting opera composers in the country"” (Washington Post), composer Kamala Sankaram moves freely between the worlds of experimental music and contemporary opera. Recent commissions include works for the Glimmerglass Festival, Washington National Opera, the PROTOTYPE Festival, and Creative Time, among others. Kamala is known for her operas fusing Indian classical music with the operatic form, including Thumbprint, A Rose, Monkey and Francine in the City of Tigers, and the forthcoming Jungle Book. Also known for her work pushing the boundaries of the operatic form, recent works include The Last Stand, a 10-hour opera created for the trees of Prospect Park, Brooklyn, Only You Will Recognize the Signal, a serial space opera performed live over the internet, Looking at You, a techno-noir featuring live datamining of the audience and a chorus of 25 singing tablet computers, all decisions will be made by consensus, a short absurdist opera performed live over Zoom, and The Parksville Murders, the world’s first virtual reality opera. 

As a performer, Kamala has been hailed as "an impassioned soprano with blazing high notes" (Wall Street Journal). A frequent collaborator with Anthony Braxton, she has premiered his operas Trillium E and Trillium J, as well as appearing on his 12-hour recording GTM (Syntax) 2017. Other notable collaborations include Meredith Monk’s Atlas with the LA Philharmonic, The Wooster Group’s LA DIDONE (Kaaitheater, Brussels, Edinburgh International Festival, Rotterdam Schouberg, Grand Théâtre de la Ville, Luxembourg, St. Anne’s Warehouse, NY, REDCAT, Los Angeles),and the PROTOTYPE Festival’s production of her composition THUMBPRINT (Baruch Performing Arts, NY, REDCAT, Los Angeles). Kamala is the leader of Bombay Rickey, an operatic Bollywood surf ensemble whose accolades include two awards for Best Eclectic Album from the Independent Music Awards, the 2018 Mid-Atlantic touring grant, and appearances on WFMU and NPR. Awards, grants and residencies: Jonathan Larson Award, NEA ArtWorks, MAP Fund, Opera America, HERE Artist Residency Program, the MacDowell Colony, and the Watermill Center. 

Dr. Sankaram holds a PhD from the New School and is currently a member of the composition faculty at SUNY Purchase.

Dameun Strange is a sound artist, multi-instrumentalist, and award-winning composer of conceptual electronic and improvised electro-acoustic works focusing on the African diaspora's stories and themes, often exploring surrealist and afro-futurist ideas with unique impressionism. Dameun is compelled to express through sound and poetry, the beauty and resilience of the Black experience, digging into a pantheon of ancestors to tell stories of triumph while connecting the past, present, and future.

Dameun has worked with such artists as Leslie Parker, Ananya Chatterjea, J. Otis Powell, and Sha Cage and has been a featured performer in concerts celebrating the work of George Lewis, Thurston Moore, and Henry Threadgill. He is a 2018 recipient of the ACF | Create Award and 2019 Jerome Hill Fellowship.

Dameun lives in Saint Paul, MN with his wife, Corina, and their 4 yo, Ezra. Like any good nerd, he enjoys a good sci-fi story and has a soft spot for anything related to cosmology.

Darian Donovan Thomas is a mediaqueer artist, whose work is rooted in exploring the intersectionality of genre, identities (imposed and/or claimed), and artistic medium. To create a body of all-inclusive works that makes every audience member realize they are being spoken to directly and personally is the goal – being at the intersection of multiple identities means being able to speak to everyone.

Darian received his Bachelors in Music Composition from The University of the Incarnate Word, and was a 2018 New Amsterdam Composer Lab Fellow, 2018 SoSI Composer Fellow, and 2019 Banglewood Composition Fellow. He has toured the world with Kazu Makino of Blonde Redhead, and is currently the touring violinist for Moses Sumney.