ParticipantsSylvia Alajaji is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Musicology at the Eastman School of Music, where she has remained active as a performer, both as a soloist and a chamber musician, and as a member and teaching assistant of the school’s highly renowned Balinese Gamelan Ensemble. A Rhodes Scholarship finalist and member of Phi Beta Kappa, her research interests include Armenian music and identity and popular music culture and society. Her publications include a recent review of Armenian folk music in Armenian Forum. She is currently at work on her dissertation, Diasporic Communities and Negotiated Identities: Trauma, Recovery, and the Search for the Armenian Musical Voice. She is a summa cum laude graduate of the University of Tulsa, where she received a degree in piano performance with a minor in chemistry. [abstract] Byron Au Yong produced the compact disc compilation A BRIDGE HOME: Music in the Lives of Asian Pacific Americans, for the Wing Luke Asian Museum in 1997. He was music consultant for TAIKOPROJECT, and has served on the advisory board for Peter Gabriel’s WOMAD USA and on the task force for the Seattle Symphony Learning Center. Byron has created and performed large ensemble works for the 2002 World Festival of Sacred Music and the 1999 Vancouver Folk Music Festival Main Stage. Active as a composer, his music has been performed at the Fukuoka Gendai Hogaku Festival in Japan, the Jeonju Sanjo Festival in South Korea, Grand Performances in Los Angeles, and the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Hamburg. He holds an MA in dance studies from UCLA and is finishing an MFA in musical theatre writing from the Tisch School of the Arts. Christine Bacareza Balance is a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at New York University. Her dissertation focuses on Pilipino American performance through the lenses of war and technology. Her research interests include deviance and pharmacology, Asian American women, popular culture, suburbia, and performance. [abstract] Vivek Bald is a documentary filmmaker and electronic musician currently working on a Ph.D. in American Studies at NYU. Bald's film work includes Taxi-vala/Auto-biography (1994), an early chronicle of the lives, experiences and political activism of South Asian immigrant taxi drivers in New York City, and more recently Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music (2003), which weaves together music documentary and social documentary to explore the rise of South Asian music in 1970s-90s Britain. Bald, who produces and performs music under the name Siraiki, also co-founded the groundbreaking Mutiny club-night in 1997, which, over the course of its six years, became an international hub on the South Asian diasporic music scene. He has collaborated in the studio and on stage with Asian Dub Foundation's Chandrasonic, fellow Mutiny residents Navdeep and Zakhm, underground hip-hop producer Mike Ladd, and New York electronica artist, DJ Spooky. [abstract] Rich Blint is a doctoral candidate in the American Studies Program at NYU. His research interests include race, nationalism, and belonging; moral panics and the manufacturing of consent; media studies and U.S. popular culture, post-colonialism, globalization, and diaspora. He is in the early moments of research for his dissertation, “‘Wounded Kinship’: Cross-Racial Encounters in Modern American Culture." [abstract] Lessa Bouchard has a BFA in theatre from the University of Detroit Mercy. She co-founded the women‚s theatre company POW! and The Trumbullplex, an anarchist housing and performance collective in Detroit. She was the program manager for the development of Recuerdos de los Repatriados at Matrix Theatre Company. Currently she is contributing to further development of the ACCESS Project at Victory Gardens Theater in Chicago. She lives there by a big lake and, when she is not snooping about the archives of institutions of higher learning, supports herself by teaching teenagers how to present science activities to the public at the Museum of Science and Industry. [abstract] T. Nikki Cesare is currently a PhD candidate in Performance Studies at Tisch School of the Arts/NYU and Managing Editor of TDR: The Drama Review. She has been published in TDR, Performance-Research, and the Village Voice, and has presented papers at Harvard University and the University of Michigan. A classically trained double bassist, Nikki works with the Chicago- and New York-based International Contemporary Ensemble and is writing her dissertation on contemporary theatre music as body art. Kate Foley makes choreography for stage, film, video and specific sites. She founded and directed dance companies in New York (World Trade Dance, 1986-89) and San Francisco (Kate Foley Company, 1989-98) and has created 15 multi-media works for the stage. She is a certified Iyengar yoga teacher, and currently teaches in the Department of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA, where she is earning her Master’s degree. [program notes] Monica Hairston received her M.M. in Music Literature from the University of Georgia, taught French horn and Music History at Morris Brown College, and is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Ethnomusicology at New York University. She has taught courses on women and music, blues and jazz “history” at Ramapo College, Hofstra University and New York University. Her areas of interest include African American popular music, jazz (particularly of the 1940s), women’s music cultures, and feminist and queer theory. Her dissertation topic is Hazel Scott, Mary Lou Williams, and 1940s New York music culture. [abstract] Niko Higgins is a PhD candidate in ethnomusicology at Columbia University where he is forming a dissertation on intercultural improvisation involving musicians of the Indian diaspora. His masters thesis looked at the musician-run organization Jump Arts and discussed the importance of the improvisation of free jazz to various levels of structure and agency in society. He is a saxophonist and composer, and his next recording will be released this spring. [abstract] Sydney Hutchinson received her M.A. in ethnomusicology from Indiana University's Folklore Institute and is now a Ph.D. candidate in the same field at New York University. A dancer, pianist, and accordionist originally from Arizona, Hutchinson researches and writes on Mexican-American dancing such as the quebradita and on salsa when she's not working on her dissertation on Dominican merengue típico. Her articles have appeared in the CENTRO Journal, Folklore Forum, Urban Folk, the Encyclopedia of Latino Popular Culture, and elsewhere. [abstract] Loren Ludwig is a second-year student in the University of Virginia's Critical and Comparative Studies in Music PhD program. His research interests include the performance practice, identity politics, and embodied reception of such repertories as electronic dance music, hip hop and 17th century instrumental music. He is currently working on the widely repudiated hip hop subgenre of "backpack" rap. [abstract] Tina Majkowski is a PhD. student in the performance studies department. Her work is currently focused on contemporary Native American performance. [abstract] Wayne Marshall is a scholar/producer interested in the ways that popular music reflects and informs our ideas about self and community. A Ph.D. student in ethnomusicology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Wayne is writing a dissertation on the thirty-year interplay between hip-hop and reggae, examining music‚s power to give shape and form to the social and cultural flows between the United States and Jamaica and the new identities emerging through transnational circulation. Wayne is also a producer and performer of various electronic and popular musical styles, seeking to inform his study of music through his creative work and vice versa. While living in Jamaica during the first half of 2003, Wayne conducted dissertation research, recorded an album‚s worth of songs, interviews, and soundscape samples, and initiated a series of digital music workshops in high schools and prisons in and around Kingston. Currently, Wayne is living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, teaching,! making music, and working on his dissertation.[abstract] Adriana Martinez is a singer and candidate to the Doctor of Philosophy degree in Musicology at the Eastman School of Music of the University of Rochester. Her research interests include world music, gender studies, popular music, music in the Americas, and twentieth-century music. She has presented her research at national and international conferences, most recently at the Symposium of the International Musicological Society in Melbourne, Australia. Her dissertation, of which her paper today is a part, focuses on the relations between Mexico and the United States and their effects on musical life in both countries during the 20th century. [abstract] hiphopunkfunkmamboska band P.I.C blends hip hop, punk, funk, and ska in a style that “recalls the aftermath of a collision between the tour buses of Stevie Wonder, Arrested Development, and Sly and the Family Stone,” writes Gillian Nash of Logo Magazine. P.I.C’s debut album HIPHOPUNKFUNKMAMBOSKA!!! (2000) was added to over 300 radio stations nationwide and reached Number One on CMJ (College Music Journal) charts from Canada to Hawai’i. P.I.C’s second album SEXY PICNIC (2003) was picked up for national distribution by Select-O-Hits Records. P.I.C was house band for Comedy Central's stand-up comic variety show PREMIUM BLEND. The P.I.C cast – Horny Jeff (saxophone), J-Bomb (mc), Rice (keyboards), Sulu (mc, trumpet), Un-G Wasmabati (mc, dj), Rick Fingers (bass), and Mark Concerto (guitar) – was created as part of a NYU film school mockumentary about a rap crew with ridiculous and often demented opinions on music and race. To collect the necessary footage, cast members Sulu, Rice and Un-G decided to end! orse these absurd views onstage at venerable New York City music venues. Armed with turntables, a keyboard, some borrowed lo-fi karaoke microphones, and a do-it-yourself punk rock attitude with songs mostly about “luv for ya’ mama.” Since then, the group, now known as P.I.C, has played everything from Hollywood after parties to hipster Lower East Side joints to Brooklyn warehouses. [website] Taisha Paggett is a first year M.F.A. student at the department of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA. Her current studies and choreographic work explore issues surrounding the body as a medium within and beyond western dance conventions. Before entering WAC she lived in New York City where she danced with Fiona Marcotty, Stanley Love Performance Group and Bopi’s Black Sheep. Most recently she has worked with Cheryl Kershaw, Esther Baker, Maria Gillespie and Norah Zuniga Shaw. [program notes] Justin Patch is a masters candidate is ethnomusicology at the University of Texas at Austin. He holds a bachelor's degree in jazz studies and guitar performance from the University of Minnesota and a masters degree in guitar performance from the Boston Conservatory. [abstract] Melissa Payne trained in classical music and French horn performance. After teaching music in Prague, she went on to study ethnomusicology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London University. Her PhD concerns diasporic dimensions of Romani music making in Ostrava, Czech Republic. [abstract] Benjamin Piekut is a graduate student in the Historical Musicology program at Columbia University. He earned an M.A. in composition from Mills College in 2001. [abstract] Matt Sakakeeny is a Ph.D candidate in ethnomusicology at Columbia University. He came to New York from New Orleans, where he was the producer of the public radio show American Routes. His interests include African-American music of New Orleans and the Caribbean. His M.A. thesis about racial positionings in New York City afrobeat performances was recently completed. [abstract] Iddi Saaka has been dancing extensively from childhood and is thus a thoroughly skilled dancer, with unique physical abilities. Although rooted deeply in his Ghanaian dance background, for the past four years while he has been residing outside Ghana, he has been exploring new movement styles such as Afro-Cuban, Senegalese and modern dance forms. He graduated with distinction from the School of Performing Arts of the University of Ghana. After graduation he choreographed for the “Pure Africa” dance troupe in Israel. In 2002 he moved to L.A. to pursue his MFA degree in choreography at UCLA. In L.A. he has choreographed and performed at the Skirball Center, the International Festival of Masks, Royce Hall of UCLA and the Fowler Museum. Saaka is a recipient of the award for outstanding performance from the University of Ghana, the Glorya Kaufman award and the Jean Irwin award. In 2003, Saaka was invited to perform in front of the president of Israel and all the African ambassa! dors to Israel. [program notes] Karen Shimakawa is an Associate Professor of Performance Studies at NYU. Her research interests include Asian American performance and cultural politics and critical race theory. [website] “Kevin So is beginning to do for young Asian-Americans what Bob Dylan did for the ‘60s generation. Carving his songs from sweet r&b, hot rock, hip-hop, and folk-pop, he presents his life and times in brash strokes of insight, wit, and empathy, all underscored by a deeply felt pride in being both Asian and American,” writes Scott Alarik of The Boston Globe. Kevin has been nominated eight times for the Boston Music Awards and has opened for Joe Cocker, Randy Newman, Boz Scaggs, and Billy Bragg. He has performed at The Fillmore West in San Francisco, The Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. and the Beacon Theater in New York City. Kevin has also written a song with Grammy award winner Keb’ Mo’ called “Talk” which was released on Keb’ Mo’s latest CD “Peace Back By Popular Demand” (Sony Records) – in response to the tragic events of 9/11. He has released 10 CDs independently since 1996, including his most recent – a live in concert CD “THE SO MUST GO ON”. He has toured ex! tensively across the US and Europe playing up to 200 shows per year. He currently lives in Brooklyn, NY where he has rediscovered his love for Chinese bakeries. [website] Inez Horton Templeton, B.A. in International Studies (concentration in Economics) University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; M.A. Media Studies, New School University in New York. Inez is the final year of her doctorate in Film and Media Studies at Stirling University in Scotland. Her research project is an ethnographic investigation of Berlin's hip hop scene. She currently resides in Berlin. [abstract] composer/improviser/pianist Described as “ineffably quaking… stirs a scene,” by La Presse Montréal and “one senses the exceptional ear, the intricate exploration and the results are impeccably powerful,” by Le Devoir Montréal, Du Yun’s works have been broadcast on China’s National Radio Station, Radio-Shanghai, China’s National Television Station, Radio-Canada, Radio Canada Internationale, Espace Musique, Art of the States, and l’Union Européene de Radio-Télévision. Her grants and awards include the British and International Bass Forum Composition Competition, Audience Award of 2004 Forum in Montréal, China National Young Composer Competition, Herbert Elwell Memorial Prize, Jerome Foundation, and Meet the Composer. Du Yun’s music has been performed by numerous ensembles, orchestras, and soloists and has been released on Le NEM and for the 50th anniversary of the Shanghai Conservatory. Born and raised in Shanghai, Du Yun has been training in music conservatories in China and the United States for mor! e than 20 years. As a result she recently fled from academia and moved to Spanish Harlem with an aim to create and perform music that is beyond classical contemporary music.Du Yun is a founding composer of the International Contemporary Ensemble. [website] |
Sponsors at NYU
NYU Department of Music (FAS)
NYU American Studies Department (FAS) NYU Performance Studies Department (Tisch) NYU Asian/Pacific/American Studies Institute (FAS) NYU Africana Studies Department (FAS) The Clive Davis Department of Recorded Music at NYU (Tisch) NYU Office for African American, Latino, and Asian American Student Services NYU GSAS Dean's Office |
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