2020 PCR Participant Bios
Zach Aliotta
Durham, NC, USA
Zach Aliotta is a violinist, composer, and teacher from North Carolina. His work centers on keeping classical music relevant in the present, and expanding the horizons of what classical music can mean.
Kate Amrine
Brooklyn, NY, USA
A passionate and creative performer, Kate Amrine is a prominent trumpet player balancing a multifaceted career from developing new repertoire and curating concerts to freelancing with many different groups in the New York City.
Brandon Auger
Halifax, NS, Canada
(b.1978) Sound researcher, improviser and structural builder. His minimalistic approach promotes the amplification of electronic idiosyncrasies in both acoustic and synthetic environments. Often utilizing architectural imprints as part of the outcome. Instagram @brandon.auger
Kent Philip Baker
Dumfries, VA, USA
Kent Baker is an award-winning composer/hornist who is a retired MSgt with The USAF Band, DC. His works have been performed by The Dallas Winds and on NBC's The Today Show.
Erich Barganier
Long Island City, NY, USA
Erich Barganier is a composer/performer living and working between New York City and Montreal. He also likes horror movies and dogs.
Simone Baron
Rockville, MD / New York, NY, USA
“Ego-less, genre agnostic and without expectations” (JazzTimes) Simone Baron’s work is grounded in playful improvisations and a restless curiosity about the creative process, making music of struggle looking both backwards and forwards often through the lens of ruins.
Rodrigo Barriga
Mexico City, Mexico
Mexican composer and performer. His work explores group relationship and communication through the use of openness and guided improvisation.
A.P. Bergeron
Lennoxville, QC, Canada
Employing both analog and digital sonic manipulation techniques, Quebec-based composer A.P. Bergeron creates experimental narrative soundscapes based in archival found sound, contemporary minimalist composition, and time-shifted field recordings drawn from his surroundings.
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Krissy Bergmark
Minneapolis, MN, USA
Krissy Bergmark is a tabla player, composer, and percussionist in the Twin Cities. Bergmark centers her work on bringing tabla to new genres and cross-genres through composition and performance.
Matthew Bridgham
Indiana, USA
Much of Matthew Bridgham’s music interacts with the formal and tonal traditions of the common practice period, refracted through a lens wholly his own. Matthew is in the post-residential phase of his Doctorate of Musical Arts degree in Music Composition at the Yale School of Music.
Che Buford
Brooklyn, NY, USA
Che Buford is a violinist and composer from Brooklyn NY. He is currently pursuing his Bachelors of Music at Boston Conservatory at Berklee
Marcus Carline
Long Beach, CA, USA
Marcus Carline is a composer/performer out of Long Beach, CA. He currently performs with C3LA, Choral Arts Initiative, Tonality, Westbeat, and the LA Electroacoustic Ensemble, and frequently works with the voice, electronics, and improvisation in his compositions.
Ernesto Cárcamo Cavazos
Berlin, Germany
Ernesto Cárcamo Cavazos is a composer and guitarist of contemporary music. Although working in many different styles, he's most interested in electro-acoustic relationships, microtones, randomness, and aggressive spatialization as compositional and performative devices.
Kaze Patricio Chan
ShenZhen, China
Patricio has scored for many independent films, theaters, light projection shows and animation performing in China, Korea, Poland, Canada and America.
Ethan Cohn
Montréal, QC, Canada
Ethan Cohn is a bassist and composer. Based in Montreal for the past six years, he is currently in the process of moving to New York and beginning anew.
Michael Shingo Crawford
Philadelphia, PA, United States
Michael Shingo Crawford is a Philadelphia-based composer and violinist who explores narrative and extramusical ideas through sound. His work is inspired by literature, visual art, dance, and his Japanese heritage.
Bang Lang Do
Fountain Valley, CA, USA
Recorded by Radio-Canada, BangLang has premiered pieces of Canadian and American composers since 1996, after winning the Eckhardt-Gramattee competition. Interdisciplinary, improvisation and cognitive science presentations at conferences fulfills her musical life.
Andrew Dyet
Los Angeles, CA, USA
Andrew Dyet is an LA-based composer and multi-instrumentalist. His works focus on creating music that expands in time, often growing into complex, deep worlds before returning to reality.
Thomas Echols
Austin, TX, USA
Thomas’s work is an amalgam of classical, modernist, and pop music forays. Thomas loves improvising, writing songs, interpreting past works, building circuits, making bleeps and bloops, and creating algorithms that perform archaic musical tasks
Thomas Fedorchik
San Antonio, TX, USA
Thomas Fedorchik lives a quiet, happy life composing and playing the piano.
Ford Fourquerean
Brooklyn, NY, USA
Ford Fourqurean is a clarinetist and composer based in New York City. He performs across the U.S. with his group Unheard-of//Ensemble and his music has been featured at Oh My Ears, Mise-En's Bushwick Open Studios, the Interference Series, Arizona State University, and Concept Lab.
Ben Finley
Guelph, ON, Canada
Ben Finley is the Creative Director of Westben’s Performer-Composer Residency. Ben Finley is a performer-composer specializing in acoustic bass and electric bass (in multiple tunings and with effects).
Eve Parker Finley
Montréal, QC, Canada
Eve Parker Finley is a producer and multi-instrumentalist based in Montreal, Quebec combining classical influences with a love of electronic soundscapes, dance music, ambient, indie pop, and folk to create sonic safe spaces for emotional experiences.
Spencer Friedman
Queens, New York City, NY, USA
Spencer Friedman is a guitarist, improviser and composer, who explores a non-idiomatic approach to the guitar. Spencer works within the contexts of Free Music, Folk, Minimalism and contemplative musics
Gordon Fry
Tampa, FL, USA
Gordon is a percussionist from Tampa, Florida interested in promoting, performing, and creating new music and how it might be embodied in a variety of forms through joyful exploration.
Gabriel Genest
Montréal, QC, Canada
Gabriel Genest is Multi-Reedist, composer and arranger based in Montreal. His compositional interest lies at the intersection of the jazz tradition and classical music.
Leandro Gimenez
Mar del Plata, Argentina
Leandro Gimenez was born in the city of Mar del Plata, Argentina. He began his musical studies at an early age. He studied jazz guitar and performed throughout the country. He graduate as Music teacher (composition orientation) in the Luis Gianneo Music Conservatory Year of graduation: December 2015. He currently studying a PhD student in music (Composition orientation) at the UCA university.
Danielle Gonzalez
Ann Arbor, MI, United States
Multimedia percussionist Danielle Gonzalez presents activist art productions inspired by social topics through video, lighting, spoken word and percussion instruments ranging from vibraphone to flower pots and metal pipes. Her in-demand programs have toured internationally through the US and Canada.
Sarah Grace Graves
Houston, TX, USA
Sarah Grace Graves is a vocalist, composer, and interdisciplinary performance artist. Her work explores sensation and its potential to create unique emotions and sounds.
Mark Gurrola
San Antonio, TX, USA
Mark FT Gurrola is a composer and multi-instrumentalist from Texas. Mark draws inspiration from art, cooking, and cats.
Cory Harper-Latkovich
Toronto, ON /Banff, AB, Canada
Cory Harper-Latkovich is Toronto based cellist. Along with music he is interested in writing and photography and finding ways for the three to intersect. He has spent the quarantine learning Russian and how to identify birds.
An-Laurence Higgins
Montréal, QC, Canada
An-Laurence is a musician/guitarist and artist from Montreal, Canada dedicated to new music and experimental art.
Malcolm Jackson
Houston, TX, US
Malcolm Jackson takes in many roles, but is primarily an active percussionist, working in various musical areas. As a multifaceted percussionist, Jackson has collaborated and recorded with various artists and composers of diverse concentrations.
Abigail Johnson
Los Angeles, CA, USA
Abigail Johnson is a sound artist currently residing in Los Angeles. She enjoys combining elements of visual art, folk music, and western art music together to challenge traditional concert roles and ideals
Emily Kennedy
Fredericton, NB, CA
Emily Kennedy is a cellist based in Fredericton, NB, Canada. She mulls over repetition, self-reflection, and time in her work, using effect pedals to expand the possibilities of her instrument.
Roger Kim
Los Angeles, CA, USA
Roger Kim’s works cross disciplines, using music, dance, theater, text, and moving graphics to tell stories. His most recent projects incorporate custom built interactive electronics as a way to blur the lines between performers, audiences, and the artwork itself.
Sheenah Ko
Montréal, QC, Canada
Sheenah Ko is a solo artist based out of Montreal and also a member of The Besnard Lakes, in addition to a touring member of Thor Harris & Friends (Swans), Kevin Hearn (Barenaked Ladies), Bedouin Soundclash and more. Sheenah's music is intended to swallow audiences into an entrancing journey where one can forget time and space, utilizing a sleu of analog keyboards, ethereal vocals and hypnotic beats.
Daniel Lemer
Los Angeles, CA, USA
Daniel Lemer is a flutist, guitarist, and composer based in Los Angeles
Cristina Lord
Los Angeles, CA USA
Cristina Lord is a Los Angeles based composer, pianist, and electronic musician. Her work explores intersectionality between musical genres and is often based around collaborative approaches to art making.
Matt Magerkurth
Fayetteville, AR, USA
Matt is a crossover composer, cellist, and improviser. In addition to my work as a composer and sideman, Matt makes his own music by blending his background as an improviser with an interest in production.
Kirin McElwain
Brooklyn, NY, USA
Kirin McElwain is a cellist and improviser who works in a variety of disciplines, including music, dance, and visual art.
Ethan Mitchell
Canada
Ethan Mitchell is a cellist, sound artist and interdisciplinary collaborator. Until recently, his alter ego Bamford Banbird was running an instagram campaign for president on an exclusively anti-bird platform.
Ben Morris
Boulder, CO, USA
Ben Morris is a composer and pianist active in both jazz and contemporary classical music. After studying in Norway as a Fulbright scholar, he is now based in Boulder, Colorado.
Matt Norman
New York City, USA
Matt Norman is a recording artists and percussionist from Petaluma, California. He received a bachelor's degree in music from Bard College in 2014 and is currently based in the New York City Metropolitan area.
Ivonne Paredes
Los Angeles, CA, USA
Ivonne Paredes is a Lima-born, Los Angeles-based composer and percussionist, whose rhythmic scores combine aspects of traditional Peruvian music with wide ranging contemporary influences.
Sascha Ram
Panama, Panama
Interdisciplinary artist. Live performer on instruments like guitar, sitar, melodica keyboards and voice. On her experience works like songwriter, theathre of oppressed acting and shortfilms arts director.
Sarah Belle Reid
Los Angeles, CA, USA
Sarah Belle Reid is a Residency Facilitator of Westben’s Performer-Composer Residency. She is a Canadian performer-composer, active in the fields of electroacoustic trumpet performance, intermedia arts, music technology, and improvisation.
Sean Riddle
Ventura, CA, USA
Sean Riddle is a bassist, composer, improviser, and educator based active in the Southern California creative music scene. Rooted in the Black American musical tradition, his work draws from a variety of musical cultures, aiming to eviscerate the boundaries between improvisation and compsotion and to address the current political climate.
Michael Sarian
Brooklyn, NY, USA
Michael Sarian is a trumpeter and composer whose work has been described as "a steady study in dichotomy. With a wordless elegance, the New York City based musician is flexibly firm, loosely tight, and brightly dark. The innovations within his compositions are deceptively dramatic with varying degrees of a melodic sensibility." (Frank De Blase, Rochester City Newspaper)
Saman Shahi
Toronto, ON, Canada
Composer, pianist and conductor based Toronto, Saman is an avid advocate of new music and a sought-after freelancer. His range of professional activities include classical, Iranian traditional, rock, electronic and jazz music.
James Sherry
Fountain Valley, CA, USA
Trumpeter James Sherry worked as a community organizer in the Bronx, NY and as a performing artist and educator in Baltimore, Washington, DC, and Chicago. He lives in Southern California.
Soumaya Snoussi
Tunis, Tunisia
I have always been passionate about Music and Sound. Playing several instruments and performing, Composing for Film and Sound Mixing, is what keeps me ready to fight for what I desire and believe in.
Davy Sumner
Los Angeles, CA, USA
Davy Sumner is a Residency Facilitator of Westben’s Performer-Composer Residency. He is also an installation artist, composer, improviser, and Maker based in Los Angeles.
Alexandra Tibbitts
Montréal, QC, Canada
California native, Alexandra Tibbitts is a harpist and experimental improviser based in Montréal, Canada. Her sonic palette meets at the crossroads where classical, contemporary and electro-acoustic elements harmonize.
C. Olivia Valenza
Vancouver, BC, Canada
C. Olivia Valenza is a composer, clarinetist/performer, and collaborator originally from Milwaukee, WI, now based in Vancouver, BC. She is currently expanding her research/practice as part of the MFA cohort in Interdisciplinary Studies at Simon Fraser University.
Gregory J. Watson
Miami, FL, USA
Gregory J. Watson is a composer, performer, and educator dedicated to the creation, production, and performance of new music. Watson is currently pursuing his Doctor of Musical Arts degree at the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami.
Carey West
Guelph, ON, Canada
Carey West is a vocalist and educator currently enrolled in the Ph.D. program for Critical Studies in Improvisation at the University of Guelph. Her research focuses on voice and agency.
Glen Whitehead
Colorado Springs, CO, USA
Glen Whitehead, D.M.A is a trumpet artist, composer and professor at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. His research explores improvisational phenomena, interactive communication and environmental collaboration between living cultures, technologies and the natural world
Gordon H. Williams
Rotterdam, Netherlands
Gordon H. Williams is a composer and musician creating work to attempt to better understand human conditions through studying perception, cognition and communication and to find hope in building community. His research works in parallel through developing a theory of non-hierarchical music creation.
Reza Yazdanpanah
Guelph, Canada
Composer, improviser, Tar & Setar player from Iran. Currently grad Student at the IICSI program @U of Guelph.