Anne Carson
Anne Carson is a Canadian poet, essayist, translator, and professor of Classics. She studied at the McGill University, the University of Michigan, and at Princeton University from 1980-1987. She was a 1998 Guggenheim Fellow, has won a Lannan Literary Award, and in 2000 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. In the Fall of 2007, Carson was an Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany. She has published eighteen books of poetry, essays, prose, criticism, translation, dramatic dialogue, fiction, and non-fiction. She is the Distinguished Poet-in-Residence at New York University, and was a panel member for the 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize. In October 2011, she participated in the Bush Theatre’s project Sixty Six, for which she had written a piece entitled Jude: The Goat at Midnight based upon the Epistle of Jude from the King James Bible. In the Fall of 2007, Carson was an Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, Germany.
Chris Garneau
Chris Garneau has released Music for Tourists LP (2006), C-Sides EP (2007) and El Radio LP (2009), with Absolutely Kosher Records (North America), Fargo Records (Europe), Pocket Records (China), Lirico Records (Japan), and Leaplay Music (Korea). He has toured widely throughout North America, Europe, Asia, and Brazil. Chris is currently making his third full-length album in the foothills of the Hudson Valley in Upstate New York.
Christian Marclay
Christian Marclay is a Swiss and American visual artist and composer. Marclay’s work explores connections between sound, noise, photography, video, and film. He uses gramophone records and turntables as musical instruments to create sound collages. He studied at the Ecole Supérieure d’Art Visuel in Geneva (1975–1977), the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston (1977–1980) and the Cooper Union in New York (1978). As a student, he was notably interested in Joseph Beuys and the Fluxus movement of the 1960s and 1970s. While based in Manhattan, Marclay has divided his time between New York and London in recent years. He released Album Without a Cover on Neutral Records in 1986. Marclay has collaborated with musicians such as John Zorn, William Hooker, Elliott Sharp, Otomo Yoshihide, Butch Morris, Shelley Hirsch, Flo Kaufmann, Crevice, and the group Sonic Youth. He won the Golden Lion for The Clock at the 2011 Venice Biennale.
Collective Opera Company
Collective Opera Company is a multi-disciplinary network of performers and artists dedicated to creating original opera works, while catalyzing creative exchange between artists of various disciplines. COC has included over twenty artists over all disciplines, and has given over forty performances in venues including Jacob’s Pillow, Dance Theater Workshop, La MaMa, Danspace, Galapagos, Monkey Town, The Abrons Arts Center, Mt. Tremper Arts, OMI International Arts Center, The Delancy, P.S.122, Secret Project Robot, Dixon Place, Chez Bushwick, Sarah Meltzer Gallery, The Ohio Theater, Wallabout Studios, Cornell University, The Mannes College of Music, as well as several public performances, including the Make Music New York Festival under the presentation of American Opera Projects.
David Campbell
Arranger, Conductor, and Orchestration
Composer-arranger-conductor David Campbell’s work appears on more than 425 gold/platinum albums, such as #1 hits by Green Day, Evanescence, Dixie Chicks, Kelly Clarkson, Miley Cyrus, Beck and Adele. His film work has earned two Oscars for music. He has guest-conducted Los Angeles Philharmonic, Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, Dallas, Nashville, Melbourne and Baltimore symphonies, Tokyo Philharmonic, and at the 2000 & 2012 Olympics.
David Grubbs
David Grubbs is a sound designer, and has released eleven solo albums. He is known for his cross-disciplinary collaborations with poet, Susan Howe, and visual artists, Angela Bulloch and Anthony McCall. Grubbs was a founding member of the groups Gastr del Sol, Bastro, and Squirrel Bait, and appears on recordings by, the Red Krayola, Tony Conrad, Pauline Oliveros, Will Oldham, the Wingdale Community Singers, and many others. He is featured in Augusto Contento’s forthcoming documentary film, Parallax Sounds, and is currently completing the book, Records Ruin the Landscape: John Cage, The Sixties, and Sound Recording for Duke University Press. Grubbs was a 2005-2006 grant recipient from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and has been called one of two “Best Teachers for an Indie-Rocker to Admire” in the Village Voice. He is an associate professor in the Conservatory of Music, and the MFA program in Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA) at Brooklyn College.
Jesse Stiles
Jesse Stiles was born in 1978 in Boston, Massachusetts. He is a sound designer, a new media artist, a composer/musician, and a designer of electronic instruments. Through the adaptive misuse of emerging digital technologies, Stiles creates works that are entertaining, disorienting, immersive, and transformative. Stiles’ performances and generative installation work engage with, and deconstruct, a number of populist formats, including electronic music, cinema, and the “light show”. He pushes these mediums into realms that are both sublime and subliminal. Stiles has exhibited and performed at nationally and internationally recognized institutions, including Carnegie Hall, Ars Electronica, Lincoln Center, Eyebeam, The Park Avenue Armory, and the American Land Museum. His first solo gallery show, “Automatic Speleology,” was at The Warehouse Gallery in Syracuse, NY in 2010. Stiles has produced a number of site-specific performances in unconventional sites. “Topics in Advanced Facemelting” was a light and sound performance in one of the United States’ few remaining gasholder buildings in Troy, New York, and “Deja Rendez Vous” was a performance on a floating video stage adrift in the Buffalo Bayou in Houston, Texas. In 2000, Stiles was awarded the Watson Fellowship, which is a one-year grant that enabled him to travel around the world creating electronic music. This trip culminated in the album Watson Songs. Stiles’ recordings have been published by Conrex Records, Specific Recordings, and Gagarin Records.
Loren Kiyoshi-Dempster
Loren Kiyoshi Dempster uses a combination of computer, electronics, field recordings, cello, improvisation, notated scores, and world music influences to create and perform music. He has performed with Dan Joseph Ensemble, Trio Tritticali, String Power, Spontaneous River, and Left Hand Path, and many others. His compositions for music and movement have been presented at The Stone, Roulette, Issue Project Room, North River Music, Wesleyan College, and at Chez Bushwick, a 2007 Bessie Award-winning performance arts space in Brooklyn, of which he is a founding member. He has toured extensively with Merce Cunningham, and he played John Cage’s solo cello work “One8” for the piece Interscape. Dempster has toured with the Berlin-based choreographer, Jeremy Wade, performing “Glory” with a live musical electronics score, co-composed/performed with Michael Mahalchick. In 2009, he was an alternate cellist for Garden of Earthly Delights, choreographed by Martha Clarke. He also performed with Didjeridu and Conch Shell, alongside his father, Stuart Dempster, in a Spring 2009 performance of Terry Riley’s “In C”, at Carnegie Hall. Ever interested in the relationships between movement, space, and sound, Dempster creates and performs music for many choreographers, including Chris Ferris, Jonah Bokaer, Project Limb, and Stochastic Ensemble.
Pharrell Williams
GRAMMY® Award winning and Academy Award nominated musician Pharrell Williams is a creative force, using music, fashion and design to express his distinctive style. His latest venture, i am OTHER, is a multi-media creative collective that serves as an umbrella for all his endeavors, including textile company Bionic Yarn. Williams is also the lead vocalist/drummer of funk/hip hop band N*E*R*D. His single “Happy” was the most successful single in 2014 worldwide.
Stavros Gasparatos
Stavros Gasparatos is a composer and sound artist. He composes music for dance, theatre and cinema, but he is also frequently working on solo projects. His music has been performed in Greece, London, Macao, Napoli, Berlin, Toronto, So a, Amsterdam, Paris and New York. He is a frequent collaborator of the National Greek Theatre.
Alexis Georgopoulos
Alexis Georgopoulos is a composer and artist based in New York City. Under the Arp moniker, he has tended towards liminal, minimal music, often using analog synthesizers and classical stringed instruments. Georgopoulos often collaborates with visual artists. He has also scored for film and choreographers as well as design studio RO/LU and French fashion house Chanel.
Soundwalk Collective
Soundwalk Collective is an international art collective based in Berlin and New York City. Since 2000, they have been “sonic nomads”, embarking on never ending journeys from the desolate land of Bessarabia, to the desert of Rub al Khali. By exploring and documenting the world’s sounds, the Collective abstracts and re-composes narrative sound pieces through fragments of reality, to form distinct audible journeysthrough choreographically specific geographies. Soundwalk’s live performances are diverse, and are often site and venue specific. They use a combination of custom-cut vinyl records with multiple turntables, tape machines, and laptop computers. Although sound and music are the primary forces in the live setting, video projection specific to each performance piece creates an environment that is inescapable and unique. Live performances can also be transformed into temporary or permanent installations. Aesthetic refinement and conceptual narrative is paired with a performative impulse, making Soundwalk Collective’s shows intimate and powerful. Created by Stephan Crasneanscki, who lives and works in New York, the Collective’s recent installations and performances were shown at Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, MADRe Museum of Contemporary Art in Napoli, New Museum in New York, National Museum of Singapore NMS in Singapore, Abu Dhabi: Art, Talks and Senstions in Abu Dhabi, Mobile Art by Zaha Hadid in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and New York, EXIT Festival at Maison des Arts de Creteils in Paris, Villa de Noailles – Centre d’Art et de Culture Contemporain in Hyères, Gare Saint Saveur in Lille, Palacio Belmonte in Lisbon, KaZantip Republic, Florence Gould Hall in New York, ARMA 17 in Moscow, and Lille Fantastic in Lille. Soundwalk is comprised of four members, Stephan Crasneanscki from France, Dug Winningham from the USA, Simone Merli from Italy, and Kamran Sadeghi from Iran/USA.