Piper Hill is a performer, composer, and theater artist from central Ohio. He went to Oberlin for undergrad and now goes here for grad school. He's writing two musicals: one of them is in-real-life with a few people all together in one room singing and playing games, and the other is made out of in-game footage from The Sims 3 & 4 and he's singing all the voice parts. Check out the opening number in the YouTube playlist (if you want)! Thanks for coming to the website.
Hamed Sinno is a writer, musician, and social justice advocate. Their current research explores digital vocality as a site of political negotiation and dis/embodiment of identarian subjectivities. Sometimes H writes musicals. Sometimes H likes to call them operas. They often write, and lecture about popular culture as engaged practice. They have been the lyricist and front-person for Mashrou Leila since 2008, with a BFA from the Department of Architecture and Design at the American University of Beirut.
Trevor Van de Velde (b. 1998) is a composer and creative technologist.
His research is oriented towards exploring the relationship between
technology and play through electroacoustic composition, intermedia
installations, and gaming. Trevor's works aim to form a performative
interface to discuss topics of cultural identity, techno-culture, and
digitalness.
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).
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.
Armond's Linkedin
(They/Them: Anishinaabe, Nipissing First Nation) Olivia Shortt is a Tkarón:to-based transdisciplinary performing artist. They are a multi-instrumentalist, vocalist, noisemaker, improviser, composer, sound designer, curator, administrator, and producer.
Highlights include their Lincoln Center (NYC) debut in 2018 with the International Contemporary Ensemble, their film debut performing in Atom Egoyan's 2019 film 'Guest of Honour', as well as recording an album two kilometres underground with Stereoscope in the SnoLAB (Neutrino Lab in Sudbury, Canada). Recent commissions include Long Beach Opera (Songbook 2020), the JACK Quartet (JACK Studio), a new opera for Loose Tea Music Theatre (Toronto), and Blue Ridge Chamber Festival (Vancouver).
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 is featured in the 2020 Winter edition of Musicworks Magazine. Also, they love cats.
