Sky Macklay is a composer, oboist (with Ghost Ensemble), and installation artist based in Baltimore, where she is Assistant Professor of Composition at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University. Her music is conceptual yet expressive, exploring extreme contrasts, surreal tonality, audible processes, humor, and the physicality of sound. Sky’s work has been recognized with awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Chamber Music America, ASCAP, MacDowell, and Civitella Ranieri. Recent projects include an opera set in a uterus, a set of mnemonic songs for mushroom hunters, and three interactive installations of harmonica-playing inflatable sculptures.

Amirtha Kidambi is invested in the creation and performance of subversive music, from free jazz and improv, to electroacoustic, noise, experimental bands and new music. She is an educator, activist and organizer, informed by anti-racist, decolonial, anti-patriarchal, anti-caste and anti-capitalist values. As a bandleader, she is the creative force behind Elder Ones and has received critical praise from the New York Times, Pitchfork, and Wire magazine. In addition to leading Elder Ones and vocal ensemble Lines of Light, Kidambi is a key collaborator in Mary Halvorson’s sextet Code Girl, the duo Angels & Demons highlighting the poetry of Sun Ra with saxophonist Darius Jones, duo with bassist Luke Stewart, duo with Matteo Liberatore, Neti-Neti with percussionist Matt Evans and in various collaborations with William Parker.

Composer Paola Prestini has collaborated with poets, filmmakers, and scientists in large-scale multimedia works that chart her interest in themes ranging from the cosmos to the environment. She has created, written and produced projects such as the world’s largest and first communal VR opera, The Hubble Cantata, and the eco-documentary The Colorado. Her opera Sensorium Ex, produced by her frequent creative partner Beth Morrison Projects, dives into community impact and AI – bridging her love of collaboration with system building. Prestini is a Co-Founder of VisionIntoArt, a non-profit new music and interdisciplinary arts production company in New York City and is the Co-Founder/Artistic Director of the non-profit music organization National Sawdust.

Ayanna Woods is a Grammy-nominated performer, composer, and bandleader from Chicago. Her music explores the spaces between acoustic and electronic, traditional and esoteric, wildly improvisational and mathematically rigorous. She earned her B.A. in music from Yale University. Woods’ music has been performed in the US and abroad by Chanticleer, Third Coast Percussion, The Crossing, and Manual Cinema. Her band Yadda Yadda will release its debut EP, Spies & Remedies, this spring.

Praised by the New York Times for her “spellbinding music,” Phyllis Chen (she/her) is a composer and sound artist whose music draws from her tactile exploration with sound. She is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, 2019 Cage-Cunningham Fellow and creates music that reflects her third culture kid experience. She is a founding member of the International Contemporary Ensemble, the founder of the UnCaged Toy Piano and an assistant professor at SUNY New Paltz.

According to the Los Angeles Times, Eve Beglarian “is a humane, idealistic rebel and a musical sensualist.” Her current projects include a collaboration with writer/performer Karen Kandel and director Mallory Catlett about women and gender-expansive people in Vicksburg from the Civil War to the present which will premiere at Harlem Stage in January 2023, and a piece for 24 basses in a grove of trees, composed for Robert Black and friends. Since 2001, she has been creating A Book of Days: “a grand and gradually manifesting work in progress…an eclectic and wide-open series of enticements.” (Los Angeles Times)