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Performer
Jen Anaya (they/them) is a theater/music/art/ritual space maker, doula and energy healer from the desert of Yavapaiv Apache, Cocopah and O'odham land. They have created for and performed in rock bands, web series, art installations, plays, operas, dance theater, films, solo shows, healing rituals and musicals all over LenapeHoking, Turtle Island and beyond. The intersection of art, expansion and healing is where Jen's passion and curiosity are most alive.
Kalli Siamidou is a greek pontian dancer, choreographer and performer based in New York City. She is interested in exploring many different dance forms from studio born styles like ballet and modern to more folklore like salsa and greek folk dances. She has been a core member of Constellation Chor since 2016.
Nikko is an NYC-based writer and performer, a recipient of a 2016 Jonathan Larson grant, and an O’Neill Music Theater Conference Finalist. Projects include Nikola Tesla Drops The Beat (w/ Benjamin Halstead, Adirondack Theater Festival); Start Again (Musical Theater Factory); ElseWhere (Town Stages) and In Pursuit of Magic (Kennedy Center Millenium Stage). Writer’s residencies at Village Theater Festival, Pace New Musicals, the Johnny Mercer Songwriters Project, Catwalk, Songspace, and Goodspeed Writers Colony.
Shawn Shafner (he/they) is an artist, educator and facilitator. As founder of The People's Own Organic Power (POOP) Project, Shawn catalyzes conversations about sustainable sanitation for every pooper - and the planet we poop on. Look for his book Know Your Shit on shelves Feb 2022, and find more at www.thePOOPproject.org/ When he’s not pooping, Shawn teaches meditation and mindful creativity, leads movement classes through the lineage of choreographer Tamar Rogoff, sings with Marisa Michelson’s Constellation Chor Ensemble, and facilitates arts-integrated workshops for learners of all ages.
Martine Thomas is a violist and poet based in New York City. She began her Doctorate of Musical Arts at CUNY Graduate Center in Fall 2021 and she has a Masters in Viola Performance as well as a Bachelor of Arts in English from the Harvard-New England Conservatory dual degree program…
Gabrielle Chou is a New York-based pianist and violinist seeking to defy genres and break barriers in music education and performance tradition. On both instruments she performs solo, chamber music, and in large ensembles, teaches and lectures in the studio and classroom, coaches chamber music, collaborates with composers and dancers, and is active in community engagement. Her education includes the Colburn Music Academy, The Juilliard School, and the CUNY Graduate Center, where she is getting her doctorate. Gabrielle serves as faculty at Baruch College, staff pianist and teaching fellow at Juilliard, and plays with the Center for Musical Excellence, Metropolis Ensemble, and Nu Deco Ensemble. She loves art museums, aquariums, playing video games, and reading science fiction.
A Washington native, cellist Audrey Chen is a passionate solo and chamber musician dedicated to sharing the music-making process of discovery and collaboration with the rest of the world. She has performed across the globe, including at Carnegie Hall, the Mariinsky Theatre, Royal Albert Hall, and the Kennedy Center, and has performed as a guest artist with the Boston Chamber Music Society, A Far Cry, the Silk Road Ensemble, the Parker Quartet, and the Borromeo Quartet. Audrey’s festival appearances include at Music@Menlo, Ravinia Steans Music Institute, Perlman Music Program, Tanglewood Music Center, Taos School of Music, and Sarasota Music Festival. After receiving a Bachelor’s from Harvard University and Master’s in Music from the New England Conservatory, she is now pursuing a Doctorate in Musical arts from the CUNY Graduate Center. Her main teachers include Laurence Lesser, Lluis Claret, and Marcy Rosen.
Violist Maren Rothfritz is a passionate artist and educator who is equally at home on the concert stage and in the teaching studio. As violist in the Argus Quartet since 2019, Maren enjoys seeking colorful musical expressions across a wide range of repertoire old and new. From 2016-2018 she was a Fellow with Carnegie Hall’s Ensemble Connect, performing and teaching throughout New York City. Previously, she completed her Master’s degree with Kim Kashkashian at New England Conservatory, where her concentration was Music-in-Education. Her festival credits include Yellow Barn, Ravinia’s Steans Music Institute, the Lucerne Festival Academy, and Keshet Eilon. Born in Paderborn, Germany, Maren began violin studies at age of four. At sixteen, she entered into the Hochschule für Musik Detmold and joined the viola class of Diemut Poppen a year later. She subsequently attended the Escuela Superior de Música Reina Sofía in Madrid (2011-13) and the Conservatorium van Amsterdam (2013-14), where she studied with Nobuko Imai. She moved to the United States in 2014 and is now working towards a Doctorate of Musical Arts at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where she was awarded the prestigious CUNY Graduate Center Fellowship and is mentored by Ettore Causa. Currently, she teaches at Brooklyn College as a Teaching Fellow, and is on faculty at the annual festival “Point Counterpoint” in Vermont.
Violinist/violist, composer, and visual artist Leah Asher is an avid performer of contemporary music and creator of new artistic works. Leah is a member of The Rhythm Method string quartet, the violin-piano duo Aether Eos, and co-creator of the series ‘Meaningless Work’ with Nicolee Kuester. She has been featured as a concerto soloist with NOSO Sinfoniettaen and Oberlin’s Contemporary Music Ensemble. Leah formerly served as solo violist of NOSO Sinfoniettaen and co-principal viola of the Arctic Philharmonic. She regularly performs with other New York-based ensembles such as International Contemporary Ensemble, Talea ensemble, and Shattered Glass.
Violinist Jessica Oddie has recently returned to New York City after working as the Assistant Concertmaster of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra. As a chamber musician and soloist, she has performed recitals at Teatro La Fenice (Venice), Le Poisson Rouge, Lincoln Center, Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris, the Sydney Opera House, and the Melbourne Recital Centre.
Horn player Nicolee Kuester is based in NYC and divides her time between experimental music and the Older Stuff, recently performing with the International Contemporary Ensemble, The Knights, Talea, and Wet Ink Ensemble in NYC; Ensemble Intercontemporain in Paris; Alarm Will Sound in St Louis; and Kaleidoscope Chamber Orchestra in Los Angeles. She is co-founder with Leah Asher of MEANINGLESS WORK, a performance series that happily meanders between sounds, performance art, text, and movement theater.
Nicolee holds undergraduate degrees in horn performance and creative writing from Oberlin College & Conservatory and graduate degrees in contemporary music performance from UC San Diego. In addition to mucking about with experimental sounds and chamber music, she continues to do teaching artist work with high school students in Ridgewood, Queens as an alumna of Carnegie Hall’s Ensemble Connect fellowship. She also freaks out teens most summers as the brass faculty at North Carolina’s Governor’s School West, where among other things students encounter microtonal improv and learn how to stare into each other’s eyes without getting really squirmy.
Recipient of the Prize for Most Promising Contestant at the 2005 Rostropovich International Cello Competition in Paris, Alan Toda-Ambaras is active as both a soloist and a chamber musician. He has performed with Midori; Yo-Yo Ma, Sandeep Das, and other members of the Silk Road Ensemble; the Borromeo Quartet; the Parker Quartet; and has appeared twice as a soloist with the North Carolina Symphony. Recent appearances include performances in Tokyo’s Ohji Hall, Osaka’s Phoenix Hall, National Academy of Music in Vietnam, Massachusetts State Hall, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Taos Music Festival, Harvard University’s Paine Hall, and the New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall. He has been featured on French television and in several European documentaries due to his participation in the Rostropovich Competition; he has also been heard on NPR’s From The Top program, New York’s WKCR Classical station, and Boston’s Neighborhood News Network. Alan has a B.A. in History of Art and Architecture from Harvard and an M.M. from the New England Conservatory, where he studied with Laurence Lesser. He is a co-founder of the Eureka Ensemble, a new social action-oriented Boston music organization.
Karl Ronneberg is a composer, percussionist, and multimedia artist based in New York City and Seattle. Winner of the University of Michigan’s Brehm Prize for Composition and the Mannes College of Music’s Dean’s Award, Karl is the co-artistic director of Fifth Wall Performing Arts and has worked with artists and companies including Radiolab, Meredith Monk, Musicambia, Sō Percussion, and the Lincoln Center Theater’s Directors’ Lab. His work has been played by bell towers, rock bands, orchestras, arcade machines, and people dressed in squirrel costume, among others.
Violinist Maya Bennardo is an active performer living in Brooklyn, NY. Maya is passionate about opening the dialogue between composers and performers, and is devoted to performing music of the present. She is a founding member of the violin/viola duo andPlay, described by I Care If You Listen as “enthusiastic champions for new music and collaboration.” She is a core member of Mivos Quartet, Nouveau Classical Project and Hotel Elefant, and has performed with ensemble mise-en, Contemporaneous, Mimesis Ensemble, Ensemble Signal, and [Switch~ Ensemble]. Maya also performs new and traditional repertoire for violin and piano with pianist, Karl Larson, in their duo, Bennardo/Larson.
Based in Brooklyn, Jim Hopkins primarily works as an organist and, once things get more back to normal, choral conductor and educator, and is currently the Director of Music at All Saints’ Episcopal Church on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. His musical interests are wide ranging, though he has a special love for Renaissance choral music, 20th-century French music, and noisy “popular” music, and also enjoys playing harpsichord, piano, Indian harmonium, and synthesizers. He passed much of the time in the pandemic doing what many did in that situation: by baking sourdough bread and playing Animal Crossing. Both by necessity and by choice in the pandemic, he discovered a new interest in collaborating with solo singers and began to explore his interest in electronic music. He also enjoys sailing, cycling, cooking, and nerding out about coffee, music, and Christian liturgical minutiae.
Tracy Cowart is the co-managing director of the medieval-experimental ensemble Alkemie, with whom she ponders the perspectives and sounds of centuries past, especially as they resonate with (and challenge) our modern-day perceptions. Heralded as “enchanting” and “indicating [the] future health of the field of early music,” Alkemie is based in NYC and tours nationally. Tracy is currently programming a concert of 15th-century song from the feminine or non-gendered perspective that challenges our inherited narrative of courtly love. She also performs as an early and new music soloist and chamber singer with groups including Rose of the Compass, Musica Sacra, and the Cathedral Choir of St. John the Divine, and nurtures a love of foraging and amateur mycology.
Pablo Menares is a Chilean bass player based in Brooklyn, NY. He is one of the most highly regarded bass players in Chile. Since moving to New York City in 2009, he has worked widely in both Jazz and Latin music. He has performed in many of New York’s notable jazz venues, including Blue Note, Jazz Standard, Jazz Gallery, Smoke, Smalls Jazz Club, Fat Cat, 55 Bar, Lincoln Center, Steinway Hall and Carnegie Hall. He has toured extensively in Europe, Asia, North, Central and South America. Among the luminaries with whom he has performed are Sam Yahel, Arturo O’Farrill, Randy Brecker, David Kikoski, Bob Moses, Greg Osby, Melissa Aldana, Claudia Acuña and Francisco Mela.
Guitarist and composer Vinicius Gomes released his first album in 2017 "Resilência", music dedicated to fusing the Brazilian universe with modern jazz. He has performed with important composers and interpreters, such as Zizi Possi (with whom he acts as guitarist and arranger in the show "À Flor da Pele"), Rosa Passos, Jane Duboc, Arthur Verocai and Oswaldinho do Acordeon, as well as instrumental music names such as Toninho Ferragutti (with whom he recorded the album "A Gata Café", winner of the 2017 Brazilian Music Award), Thiago Espirito Santo, Robertinho Silva and Mestrinho. He has also worked with orchestras such as OSESP and Jazz Sinfônica de SP.
Mobile since her birth in Singapore, composer and saxophonist Caroline Davis’s music covers a wide range of styles, owed to her shifting environment as a child. As a leader, she has released six albums: Live Work & Play (2012), Doors: Chicago Storylines (2015), Heart Tonic (2018), Alula (2019), Anthems (2019), and Portals (2021)…
Timo Vollbrecht is an internationally performing saxophonist-bandleader, composer, reeds player, educator, and scholar. Described as "luminously fine" by the New York City Jazz Record, his music is “blessed with rhythmic fluidity and intricate twists.” Based in between his home in Lower Saxony, New York and Berlin, he is particularly active in the international jazz and contemporary music scenes. A musical omnivore, he organically combines jazz with elements of new music, post-rock, electronics, and instrumental songwriting. He has appeared on 22 albums and at landmark stages such as the Village Vanguard, Winter Jazz Fest NYC, and Jazz at Lincoln Center. He holds a Ph.D. in Jazz Studies from NYU, where he currently teaches as an Adjunct Professor. As a Fulbright scholar, he also holds a master's degree in jazz saxophone from NYU where he studied with Mark Turner, Stefon Harris, and Joe Lovano. At the Berlin University of the Arts he studied with Peter Weniger, John Hollenbeck, and Kurt Rosenwinkel to receive a Bachelor in Music Education. His research interests range at the intersections of music production, pedagogy, band interaction, improvisation, artistic citizenship, and the digital avant-garde.
