Current Graduate Students

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Eli Berman (they/she/זי/זיי) is a composer-vocalist, improviser, and new instrument builder from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She creates electroacoustic music using experimental vocal techniques across a variety of her ancestral vocal technologies, including khazones (Ashkenazi Jewish cantorial music), Yiddish and Appalachian folk songs, Slovak travnice (traditional women's haymaking songs), and western classical repertoire. Eli's work explores possibilities for embodied, nonbinary theories of the voice and gender. For example, her recent xibuccal instruments–a prototypical collection of acoustic and electroacoustic extensions of the human vocal tract–help her question the foundational myths of mind/body, self/other, and human/machine that contribute to the 'logic' of the western gender binary (man/woman).

Eli has premiered her music at multiple festivals including (R)evolution: Resonant Bodies at the Banff Centre, New Music On the Point, Yiddish Summer Weimar, New Explorative Oratorio Voice Festival, Atlantic Music Festival, and Gender Unbound. In addition to her experience as a "countertenor" and "baritone" in vocal ensembles such as C4: The Choral Composer/Conductor Collective, Eli has sung as soloist in the U.S. premiere of John Tavener's "Total Eclipse" and in a New York Times critically-acclaimed concert of works by Eve Beglarian. She has presented her music and creative research at the 2021 International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, 2020 Pan-American Vocology Association Symposium, and 2019 Transgender Singing Voice Conference. Eli recently graduated with a B.A. in Music from Princeton University (June 2020).

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Armond Dorsey (he/they) is a musician, playwright, and poet from Prince George's County, MD whose creative works center on storytelling, Blaqueerness, the Black mundane, Black masculinity, and Afrosurrealism. Armond's writing and narrative electroacoustic compositions channel history, memory, and ethnography to thread the stories Black folk have lived, continue living with, and dream of living in. The practice of intentional, deep listening lays the foundation not only for Armond's creative works but also their research. Armond's research interests combine Black studies, music cognition, sound studies, and public health to curate and develop music interventions that both address racial and historical trauma as well as improve access to care for marginalized communities.

Armond is a current first-year M.A. student in the Digital Music program at Dartmouth College. In June 2020, they graduated from Dartmouth College with a B.A. in Music modified with Neuroscience alongside a minor in African and African-American Studies.

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Photo by Alejandro Santiago | Glitter edits by Heshaka Jayawardena

Olivia Shortt (They/Them: Anishinaabe, Nipissing First Nation, makwa/bear clan with settler ancestry – canadian & irish) is a noisemaker, improviser, composer, video artist, theatremaker, curator, trouble-maker and professional disrupter. Career highlights include performing Raven Chacon's 'For Olivia Shortt' at The Whitney Museum of American Art (NYC) as part of Chacon's series of solo works 'For Zitkála-Šá' during the 2022 Whitney Biennial; playing at the Lincoln Center (NYC) with the International Contemporary Ensemble; performing in their film debut in Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan's 2019 film 'Guest of Honour'; as well as recording an album of Robert Lemay's music two kilometres underground in the SnoLAB (Neutrino Lab in Sudbury, Canada). 

Recent projects include a new opera in partnership with Loose Tea Music Theatre (Toronto), a commission for Blueridge Chamber Festival (Vancouver), and thirtyminutes (Canada/England). Works created over the last two years include commissions from Long Beach Opera (California), the JACK Quartet (NYC), and Din of Shadows (Toronto). Shortt was a finalist for the 2021 Toronto Arts Foundation Emerging Artist Award as well as awarded and named one of the 2020 Buddies in Bad Times Emerging Queer Artists. Shortt was featured in the 2020 Winter edition of Musicworks Magazine. Shortt's work is greatly inspired by their love of camp, drag and gender expression, and Indigeneity. Their work could be described as very much in flux, exploring how improvisation, text, and noise combine to create work that leaves space through fragmented storytelling. 

A recent review came from a four-year-old child who said, "I don't know why I like it," regarding a performance Shortt did of Raven Chacon's music in July 2022. Shortt adores cats, wearing glitter and traveling.

Website | Instagram

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Rodrigo Martínez is a composer and producer interested in the abstraction of Latinamerican music as a tool for new creations. With a strong interest in popular dance music, electronic music production and experimental music, Rodrigo's work explores both traditional ways of approaching music making, as well as exploring unknown aesthetic scenarios for Latinamerican music. His current explorations revolve around social music –that is, music which promotes collaboration, deep listening, and horizontality. Rodrigo has won the Arturo Marquez prize, and was recipient of the Jóvenes Creadores grant in Mexico City. He was awarded a MacDowell fellowship in 2019, and was also the winner of the Dartmouth College Wind Ensemble Composition Competition in 2020.

Website

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Charles Peoples III (He/They) is a performing artist, composer, lyricist, filmmaker, and choreographer. He uses sound, movement, and visual storytelling to create space that bends towards mysticism, spirituality, queerness, and transformation.

Charles has performed his music at multiple conferences, workshops, and theaters; significant mentions include the 9th International Sound Healing Conference, the New Living Expo, Oakland Pride Festival, San Jose Pride Festival, and the Lesher Center for the Arts. Other notable highlights include the artist residency with the East Bay Queer Healing Arts Center, the Chapel of Chimes Summer Solstice event, performing with BANDALOOP, and the 2021 collection of films and online concerts.

Charles' research interests include societal/individual misremembering and the therapeutic value of performance. He is also interested in different forms of ritual, storytelling, sound healing, and shamanism, with the goal of merging them with technology to create transformative, mystical, and immersive performances.

"We are love. We are one."

Website

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Mac Waters (they/he) (b. 2000) is a sound artist—composer, performer, improviser, producer, radio broadcaster, listener—who works in a variety of interdisciplinary contexts. Some recent interests include embodied kinesthetics and social media, the anxiety of a digital generation coming-of-age, the theater of Western performance practices, humor & spontaneity, and premodern notions of gender and sexuality (particularly in medieval European art and poetics).

Waters has worked in a variety of mediums, some of which include composing chamber music for various contemporary ensembles, composing electroacoustic music for film and dance, performing as a vocalist and violist in various interdisciplinary and multimedia performances, and electronically producing remixes as well as original music and song. Their works have been performed by Fonema Consort (Chicago), Wet Ink (NYC), Conrad Tao (NYC), Mivos Quartet (NYC), Ostravska Banda (Ostrava, CZ), and Ars Futura (Cleveland).

As a recent graduate of Columbia University where they received a BA in Music with a concentration in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Waters is pursuing an MA in Digital Musics at Dartmouth College.