Tarot

Michael Markowski

Michael Markowski is fully qualified to watch movies and cartoons. In 2010, he graduated with a degree in ‘Film Practices’ from Arizona State University. While Markowski never studied music in college, he has studied privately with his mentors, Jon Gomez, Dr. Karl Schindler, and Michael Shapiro. He has received commissions from a number of organizations including CBDNA, The Consortium for the Advancement of Wind Band Literature, The Lesbian and Gay Band Association, the Durham Medical Orchestra, the Florida Music Educator’s Association, and has received performances from the United States Air Force bands, The Phoenix Symphony, the Arizona Musicfest Symphony Orchestra, and from hundreds of bands around the world.

www.michaelmarkowski.com

Alaina Ferris

Alaina Ferris is an interdisciplinary composer, poet, and performer who specializes in choral works, opera, and contemporary theater. As an active pianist and Celtic harpist, her music is inspired by a love of Renaissance chorales and her former work as a music therapist. She is one half of the indie-folk duo, Physical Kids, alongside Matt Schlatter.

Michael Lanci

Michael Lanci is a composer and performer currently residing in Saratoga Springs, New York. His music is viscerally engaging and stylistically diverse, drawing from a wide range of influences. Michael’s short comedic chamber opera Admissions, written in collaboration with librettist Kim Davies as part of the American Opera Initiative program with the Washington National Opera, was premiered in January 2020 at the Kennedy Center. He was a finalist for the 2018-19, Beth Morrison Projects Next Generation competition that included the commissioning and premiere of his first opera Crude Capital with libretto by Ajax Phillips. Michael recently concluded a fellowship with the Composers and Voice program hosted by The American Opera Projects based in Brooklyn, NY. Michael is also working on a variety of projects within the world of Folk, Folk Rock and Indie Rock.

www.michaellanci.com

Mary Prescott

Mary Prescott is a Thai-American interdisciplinary artist, composer and pianist who explores the foundations and facets of identity and social conditions through experiential performance. The Washington Post describes her work as “masterfully envisioned… a bright light cast forward.”

Prescott is an awardee of the McKnight Composer Fellowship, NPN Creation and Development Fund, New Music USA, Puffin Foundation, Opera America, and several regional arts councils. Her commissioners include American Composers Forum, Roulette, Living Arts, Public Functionary, White Snake Projects, and Metropolis Ensemble. She has held residencies with Roulette, Lanesboro Arts, Avaloch Farm, Hudson Hall, The League of Independent Theater, and Arts Letters and Numbers.

www.mary-prescott.com

Ellen Fast

Pianist Ellen Fast is an active contributor to Pittsburgh’s music scene. She founded the Jade Piano Trio, which gave its debut performance in October 2018 as part of the Music in a Great Space series at Shadyside Presbyterian Church. She collaborates often with area vocalists and instrumentalists and has appeared with the Pittsburgh Concert Chorale, the Incidental Chamber Players, and OvreArts. She plays regularly for the Mt. Lebanon High School choirs and has served as rehearsal accompanist for Resonance Works | Pittsburgh.

Brian Losch

Brian Losch is a Grammy Award-winning recording engineer based in New York City. He has production credits which span multiple genres and include artists such as Yo-Yo Ma, Gil Shaham, Anne-Sophie Mutter, Dawn Upshaw, and Renée Fleming. As an engineer, he is most known for recording orchestras, chamber, and jazz ensembles, however, he also provides recording and music mixing services for music, television, and film projects.

Brian has received Grammy Awards for his work on Winter Morning Walks (Best Engineered Album, Classical / Best Vocal Solo, Classical). His production credits include multiple Grammy Awardwinning albums: Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Shostakovich Under Stalin’s Shadow – Symphonies Nos. 5, 8, & 9 (Best Orchestral Performance), The Goat Rodeo Sessions (Best Folk Album and Best Engineered Album, Non Classical), and Steven Mackey’s Lonely Motel (Best Small Ensemble Performance).

www.brianlosch.com

Federico García Lorca

Born near Granada in Fuente Vaqueros, Spain, prominent 20th-century Spanish poet and dramatist Federico García Lorca studied law at at the University of Granada before relocating to Madrid in 1919 to focus on his writing. In Madrid he joined a group of artists that included Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel. The group came to be known as the “Generation of ’27.’” Surrealism would greatly influence his art. Lorca published numerous volumes of poetry beginning with Impresiones y paisajes (1918). His lyrical work often incorporates elements of Spanish folklore, Andalusian flamenco and Gypsy culture, and cante jondos, or deep songs, while exploring themes of romantic love and tragedy. He cofounded La Barraca, a traveling theater company that performed both Spanish classics and Lorca’s original plays. Despite the threat of a growing fascist movement in his country, Lorca refused to hide his political views, or his homosexuality, while continuing his ascent as a writer. In August 1936, at the onset of the Spanish Civil War, Lorca was arrested and executed by a firing squad a few days later.

Jenny Xie

Jenny Xie is the author of EYE LEVEL (Graywolf Press, 2018), a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN Open Book Award, and the recipient of the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets and the Holmes National Poetry Prize from Princeton University. Her chapbook, NOWHERE TO ARRIVE (Northwestern University Press, 2017) received the Drinking Gourd Prize. She has been supported by fellowships and grants from Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Kundiman, and New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2020, she was awarded the Vilcek Prize in Creative Promise. She has taught at Princeton and NYU, and is currently on faculty at Bard College.

www.jennymxie.com

Desiree C. Bailey

Desiree C. Bailey is a poet and writer from Trinidad and Tobago, and New York. She is the author of the poetry collection What Noise Against the Cane (Yale University Press, 2021), which won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. The collection was a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize, and was longlisted for both the Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature and the International Dylan Thomas Prize. Desiree is also the author of the short fiction chapbook In Dirt or Saltwater (O’clock Press, 2016), and has short fiction and poems published in Best American Poetry, Best New Poets, American Short Fiction, Callaloo, and the Academy of American Poets, among other journals. She is currently the inaugural Writer-inResidence at Clemson University in South Carolina.

desireecbailey.com

Peter Mason

Peter Mason is a Bi+ poet and literary event, program, and development specialist from Rochester, NY currently living in the Twin Cities area. He obtained his BA from SUNY Fredonia where he organized the first and second annual Fredonia Poetry Festival, the first Fredonia Poetry Slam, as well as several other literary and community events. He earned his MFA at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, where he served as the Development Director and Assistant Poetry Editor of The Arkansas International (2018-2021) and Development Director for the Open Mouth Literary Center (2018-2021). Currently, he is the Assistant Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Minnesota.

Amanda Hollander

Amanda Hollander began her librettist career at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she was working as a university lecturer in the English Department after the filing of her doctorate in Victorian and children’s literature in 2015. Collaborating with composer Nicky Sohn, Hollander wrote a comic opera libretto adapting Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes. Her opera QUAKE with composer Kay Rhie will premiere through UCLA’s Department of Opera in Spring 2023. Hollander furthered her formal training as a Librettist Fellow through the American Opera Project’s Composer and the Voice Program for the 2019-2021 season.

Bea Goodwin

Bea Goodwin is a librettist and operatic stage director creating feminist adaptations, ghost stories and lost historical fictions. Her work has been hailed as “relentlessly clever” and “masterfully spellbinding,” with premieres in traditional theatrical spaces such as BAM, La Mama Experimental Theatre, National Sawdust, as well as site specific immersive experiences at the International Museum of Surgical Science, the Mark Hotel penthouse suite and the historic Montauk Club. Bea is represented by Spotlight Artist Management and is a bi-coastal artist, living in Los Angeles with a warm futon in Bed-Stuy.

www.beagoodwin.com