Samora Abayomi Pinderhughes is a composer, pianist and vocalist known for large multidisciplinary projects and for his use of music to examine sociopolitical issues. Samora is the director and creator of The Transformations Suite, an acclaimed project combining music, theatre, and poetry to examine the radical history of resistance within the communities of the African Diaspora. Samora’s collaborators include Sara Bareilles, Titus Kaphar, Herbie Hancock, Glenn Ligon, Daveed Diggs, and Lalah Hathaway. He works frequently with Common on compositions for music and film, and is a featured member on the new albums, August Greene and Let Love, with Common and Robert Glasper. A Sundance Composers Lab fellow, Samora scored the award-winning documentary Whose Streets? and the Field of Vision film Concussion Protocol. He is a member of Blackout for Human Rights, the arts & social justice collective founded by Ryan Coogler and Ava DuVernay, and was musical director for their #MLKNow and #JusticeForFlint events.

Fellowship Statement

As an artist, my primary goal is to ensure that whoever experiences my work will be altered in some way that affects their daily lives; how they think and act, how they relate to others, how they consider their daily relationship to their country and world. I hope to bend the conventions of artistic genre and discipline to create pieces that deeply pierce the soul, grasping at the foundational elements of what it means to be alive in this moment. My work deeply criticizes the oppressive systems of American corporatism and colonialism, and reveals the many ways people are wounded by these systems as well as the many ways they fight back, imagining possibilities beyond what is allowed. I am a prison and police abolitionist. Current projects I'm working on include The Healing Project (about trauma & healing from incarceration and violence), Venus Smiles Not (about how traditional masculinity distorts the ways men learn how to deal with loss), and Grief, a collection of songs reflecting on the past two years. I'm honored to receive this support from the Jerome Foundation to continue my work.

Photo by Jacob Blickenstaff

Anaïs Maviel is a vocalist, percussionist, composer, writer and community facilitator. Her work focuses on the function of music as essential to settling common grounds, addressing Relation, and creating utopian future. She works at the crossroads of mediums - music, visual art, dance, theater and performance art, and has been a creative force for artists such as William Parker, Daria Faïn, Shelley Hirsh, César Alvarez, Steffani Jemison. Maviel is dedicated to substantial creations from solo to large ensembles, music direction of cross-disciplinary works, and to expanding the power of music as a healing and transformative act. She performs and teaches extensively in New York, throughout North, South & Central America, and Europe. Both solo albums hOULe and in the garden, were released on Gold Bolus Recordings and received international acclaim. Lastly, Anaïs Maviel was the 2019 recipient of the Van Lier Fellowship to generate new works at Roulette Intermedium in New York City, and of the 2020 American Composers Forum Create commission for new work with the Rhythm Method string quartet.

Fellowship Statement

My work wants to hold space for weaving and disentangling narratives of self in relation to society, earth and cosmos. Despite globalization and refined technologies, individualized lives scarcely embrace interdependence. Yet the uniqueness of each being— this one thing that we share —is in fact our livelihood, both for one and many. The relational complexity of this Creole (not quite postcolonial) anthropocene era, is the field in which I operate. Music, as a form of communication prior to articulate language, is fundamental to the human experience and for the capacity to conceive of oneself in relation to one’s environment. I shape sensory experiences made of what I hear from the world, bridging the fragmented and envisioning harmony in the sensible. I hope to light the desire in everyone to re-create ways to relate, so that actualizing one means actualizing all. Transformation is an alchemical phenomenon, a leap connecting ancestral wisdom to utopian futures.

Photo by Dar Es Salaam Riser

Gamin Kang, simply known as “gamin,” is a New York City-based multi-dimensional artist performing across the genres of traditional Korean music and cross-disciplinary collaborations worldwide. Ralph Samuelson, a senior advisor of Asian Cultural Council, once praised gamin as “a true pioneer and innovator, leading traditional instruments in exciting new directions.” Gamin plays 3 types of Korean winds and is a designated Yisuja (Senior Diplomate), official holder of Important Intangible Cultural Asset No. 46 for Court and Royal Military music. Gamin earned her Doctorate in Korean Musical Arts at Seoul National University.

Re-inventing new sonorities from ancient, somewhat restrictive, musical systems, gamin has received several cultural exchange program grants, including Artist-in-Residence at the Asian Cultural Council, and Ministry of Culture, Sports, Tourism of the Republic of Korea. Gamin has collaborated in cross-cultural improvisation in NYC with world-acclaimed musicians Jane Ira Bloom, Elliot Sharp, Ned Rothenberg, Jen Shyu, presenting premieres at Roulette, New School, and Metropolitan Museum. Gamin was a featured artist at the Silkroad concert, Seoul, 2018, performing on-stage with Yo-Yo Ma.

Fellowship Statement

I play three winds: piri (double reed bamboo oboe), taepyeongso (traditional oboe), and saengwhang (mouth organ). I am now on a journey to explore musical identity, discover new connections, and collaborate with artists from different backgrounds and cultures. Our common thread is communication and self-expression. My quest begins by studying other arts and music traditions, to discover how to best express these different strains through sound and composition.

In 2011, I began participating in musical activities outside of Korea, where I was born and educated. I have since devoted my career to intercultural music-making, working with western artists and those from East Asia, particularly in projects that bring together traditional instruments with digital sound sources.

Tradition is continually transformed by new generations of artists. My compositions merge Korean tradition with modern perspectives from audiences and environments. I am developing projects based on inter-disciplinary collaborations with interest in humanity and history.

Photo by Elan Asch

Prince Harvey is a New York City-based artist, musician, and producer most famously known for recording his first album in an Apple Store. In 2017, he released an EP called Golden Child, followed by Stay Bold: 100 Days 100 Songs, where he premiered a new song every day for 100 days as a protest against Trump. In 2018, Prince was an artist at HarvestWorks and a commissioned artist at The Shed where he began work on a new music album and series of short films.

Harvey’s music has been featured in The New York Times, Noisey, Billboard, VICE, The Daily Beast, The Guardian, The Fader, and Afropunk among many others. Upon release of his first album, PHATASS, he received notice from major music and news publications, as well as celebrities like Lil Wayne, Russell Simmons and Talib Kweli. Prince Harvey’s forthcoming album will be released in Summer 2021.

Fellowship Statement

For the last one decade through music, film and performance works, I have been creating a guide that explores nuances of black and queer culture, usually censored from the general public. My practice is emboldened by my insatiable need to charter unchartered waters. To tell stories that haven't been told. To show the surprising extent of human potential through innovation and the exploring of new and unique avenues. Growing up without certain privileges, I have learned to infuse an element of hacking in the work that I do to accelerate the results that I want. As an artist I believe my talents are best utilized by creating personal and collective narratives that challenge widely accepted views of normalcy.

Photo by Christopher Garcia Valle

Eric Frye is an American composer and artist. He is known for his solo performance and installation work, which explore the dissociative and psychoactive functions of sound and image. Recently, he premiered audio-visual pieces in LA, Vancouver, Tokyo, and New York City. He has performed multi-channel works alongside central figures of experimental music including Curtis Roads and Beatriz Ferreyra (Ina GRM). His recent solo recordings include Diffusion Soliloquies (2020) and Sketches for Functional Music (2019) and sound design and voice processing for a short film, Elephant Juice, by Swiss designer Simone Niquille.  Frye’s work has been shown at HeK, Switzerland; Hangar Art Centre, Barcelona; Audio Visual Arts, New York City; Rochester Art Center, Minnesota; Variform Gallery, Oregon: and more. He has performed extensively in the US, UK, Europe, and Asia.

Fellowship Statement

In 2020, I collaborated with Viennese artist Stefan Juster (Jung An Tagen). We produced two sound projects, Pulsar Acid and Variations for Computer Ashtray, with plans to work with film in the coming months. I am currently researching voice obfuscation software and ambisonics while collaborating with colleagues on a number of multi-disciplinary projects. Intertwining surreal narratives with a multi-disciplinary approach to sound, I am assembling a shapeshifting auditory scene, one that explores the malfunction of perception and how it relates to new ways of masking, or blurring the self.

PaviElle is an amazing interdisciplinary artist, hailing from Rondo, a historically Black neighborhood in St. Paul, Minnesota. She is the recipient of an Upper Midwest Emmy Award as well as, a Sage Award for Dance and Choreography. She received a 2020 McKnight Artist Fellowship for Musicians and an, American Composers Forum Grant for her classical composition, A Requiem for Zula (2019) written in celebration of her Mother, Zula Young. She is known for her powerhouse vocals and for performing with an equally powerful 6-piece band. PaviElle was voted as Minneapolis City Pages “Best R&B Vocalist of 2015,” her band was named one of First Avenue’s Best New Bands of 2015. She is a Teaching artist and a part of the Jazz Department Faculty at MacPhail Center for Music. PaviElle honed her craft as a teenager at Penumbra Theatre, SteppingStone Theatre and with collective, EduPoetic Enterbrainment.

Fellowship Statement

I am a composer, musician, lyricist, spoken-word artist, dancer, playwright, and actor. I am influenced by so many prolific artists, nationally and locally, however, I embody my own unique technique and sound. I am an artist who believes in alchemy and that art can be used as a vehicle to not only heal myself but, to heal others in the process as well. I have realized in this process that my niche is in combining all of my artistic disciplines to create shows with music, movement, acting, dramatic storytelling and singing. The next movement and goal for my career is creating multi-disciplinary shows and further deepening learning how to orchestrate scores for orchestras. I plan to travel to work with composer mentors, as well as, study healing sound therapies. And, I hope to tour my work from this fellowship, nationally and locally.

Photo by Sharolyn B. Hagen

Raised on the verge of several musical streams since her childhood, award-winning violinist and composer Layale Chaker received her musical training at the National Higher Conservatory of Beirut in her native Lebanon, at Conservatoire de Paris and the Royal Academy of Music in London.

Layale’s musical world lies at the intersection of classical contemporary music, Jazz, Arabic Music, and free improvisation. She has received commissions and presented performances and projects around Europe, the Middle-East, North and South America and Asia, and has collaborated with Daniel Barenboim and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, Johnny Gandelsman, Holland Baroque, International Contemporary Ensemble, Oxford Orchestra, the New World Symphony, Babylon Orchestra, performing at the London Jazz Festival, Junger Kunstler Festival Bayreuth, the Lucerne Festival, and concert halls such as The Berlin Philharmonic, Abbaye de Royaumont, National Sawdust and Wigmore Hall. Her debut album with her ensemble Sarafand, Inner Rhyme, was released on In a Circle Records, and listed as “Top of The World” by Songlines with a 5-star review, NPR 10 Best Releases, and has received praises by the BBC Music Magazine, The New York Times, The Strad, Strings Magazine, Jazz World among others.

Fellowship Statement

As I have navigated through a succession of different places to call home throughout my life, music was one of the few constants that grounded me through these changes. It quickly became a familiar territory, and my way of relating to the world.

That feeling of finding one's home and voice in artistic practice soon turned into one of the main forces behind my work. Today, my communication with the world through music rises from a need and desire to create a haven of belonging, inclusion, visibility and communion for peoples’ histories and narratives through sound, and beyond words.

During the course of this fellowship, I hope and aspire to continue this focus on understanding and querying estrangement through my practice. This will be embodied through the way I conduct research for my various projects, through the development of my musical and artistic language and expression, and through the different works I intend to carry and create.

Photo by Anna Rakhvalova Photography

Leila Bordreuil is a Brooklyn-based cellist, composer and sound-artist from Southern France. After earning a degree in Cello Performance from the Conservatoire National d’Aix-en-Provence, she pursued studies in Experimental Music at Bard College under the mentorship of Marina Rosenfeld. In 2012, she moved to Brooklyn as a dedicated improviser where she became an active collaborator and “rising figure in New York’s Improvised music scene” (The Chicago Reader). In 2019, she released her debut solo LP Headflush, a “real abstract gem” (Boomkat) that “bears the authority of someone who has put many hours of thought and practice into creating her own sound” (Bandcamp).

Bordreuil received composer commissions from the French Embassy at Lincoln Center, ISSUE Project Room, the Kitchen, the French Alliance, Sounds of Stockholm Festival, GRM (Paris) and the American Symphony Orchestra. She is a 2020 artist-in-residence at the GRM, Paris. Past residencies include the McDowell Colony, ISSUE Project Room and E.M.S, Stockholm.

Fellowship Statement

My music draws from Noise, Free Improvisation, avant-garde and other experimental traditions, but adheres to no single genre. Cross-pollination is at the center of my work, both aesthetically and in practice. In my cello performances, I mix my instrument’s culturally inherited melancholia with cathartic harsh noise walls, creating “steadily scathing music [that] favors long and corrosive atonalities” (New York Times). My compositions create immersive environments that enhance psychoacoustic happenings and heighten subjective perception, supported by neuro-scientific research. Often incorporating site-specific resonance, I craft musicality out of an organized awareness of natural sound phenomena. My chamber music pieces are presented at prestigious concert halls and DIY basements alike, in an effort to permeate barriers of musical genre and scene.

During my fellowship I will create large ensemble pieces, study light art to expand my work with perception, and use the resources that Jerome Foundation provides to support the creation of DIY community art spaces after the pandemic.

Photo by Peter Ganushkin

Kashimana is a mother, musician, vocalist, composer, producer and teaching artist with a rich soulful blues voice. The name Kashimana means “that’s their heart” and you can hear Kashimana’s heart beating in the compelling sound of their music, which combines Soul, R&B, Folk, Afro-funk and more. Kashimana’s Love from the Sun CD of original songs draws from her Nigerian heritage and her experiences growing up in Nigeria and Kenya and living in the United States. In 2019, she was the In Common Composer in Residence in Willmar, MN, a Cedar Commissioned Artist, and a Northern Spark Festival Artist (as well as in 2018).

Fellowship Statement

The need to create change and to use my voice to ignite this change drives my work. I use my voice to see other universes and possibilities. With my voice, I hear the joy, the pain, where I come from and where I am going; with my voice, I heal, soothe, and create; with my voice, I am able to connect, harmonize, magnify, communicate, and transmogrify. This is why I use my voice to write, compose, sing and share.

Currently I’m experimenting with loops to create drones, chants, hums, and dissonant harmonies in an effort to create a visceral tingling effect. I use improvisational lyric writing to engage crowd participation towards collaborative creation. I’m also exploring ways of visually representing the vibrations that result from voices to create a more immersive experience.

Some works in progress include Phantom Cries (the musical), A Sprig of That, composed for a MNiature with MN Opera and a song on The Art of the Revolution album by Black artists in the wake of George Floyd’s death.

Jay Afrisando is a music composer and sound artist who employs sound and other media to share awareness of human-nature-technology relationships. His work Gunung Siggalang is in Alex Lubet’s 2020 album Three Strings and The Truth: New Music for Mountain Dulcimer. In 2019, his multisensory work The (Real) Laptop Music :)) was presented at Aural Diversity Conference and he presented a full-sphere installation Gendhing Cosmic at Linux Audio Conference.

Afrisando’s interactive installation Exploring the Music of Your Office was presented by the American Composers Forum (ACF) in the 2019 Landmark to Lowertown series. He received an Award for Excellence in 2019 from the Ambassador of the Republic of Indonesia for the United States, a 2016 Minnesota Emerging Composers Award from ACF and an Innovative Art Grant from Kelola Foundation (Yayasan Kelola) to create a participatory performance Mode[a]rn. His piece Water Siter was awarded the 2nd Prize Winner at Prix Annelie de Man 2015. He received a OneBeat 2015 residency in the US and an International Fellowship in Study of Korean Music in 2014.

Fellowship Statement

I use sound and other media to share awareness on complex issues that emerge as a result of our diverse perceptions and the technology we create, including issues on hearing and listening, disability and accessibility, the politics of technology and science, as well as culture and environment.

Through my artistic works, I aspire to capture and convey these intricate phenomena using various approaches, including but not limited to, audio and audiovisual works, 2D and 3D works, participatory work, improvisation, fixed media, and everything in between. Through my work, I want to invite my audiences to closely examine our relationships to other living entities, nature, and technology.

Photo by Kakia Gkoudina