Irina Rakhilkina

Irina Rakina is a multimedia artist and writer. She creates interdisciplinary pieces, as well as digital art and poetry. Irina has exhibited her short film ‘/(mind/body)\’ for the duration of a week in Alexander Studio of S.F.U. That project optically explored Cartesian mind | body separation. She has taken part in a group exhibition in Audain gallery. Irina wrote and performed a poem about her experiences with mind-altering states. Irina participated in the Vancouver Outsider Art Festival providing her photography with phenomenological writing. She’s an art and film reviewer for the SAD magazine. Irina intends to find the precarious balance between visual and textual forms of expression one day.

Robert Strobel

Robert Strobel (b. 1988) has composed works both electronic and acoustic. His work Prairie Dog Rhapsody received a special mention at the Alfred Schnittke Composer's Forum and Competition and as a result was published by Aldebaran Editions. His music has been broadcast twice on WPRB Princeton in Marvin Rosen’s 25-hour new music marathon, and once on Hawaii Public Radio, in the program “Singing and Other Sins.” Among the commissions he has received include an LDS Barlow Commission. Recently, his work, Refugees was selected for the SCI CD Series.

Martha Helen Schmidt

Martha Helen Schmidt is a composer from Minneapolis, Minnesota. She earned a Bachelor of Music degree at Lawrence University Conservatory of Music, and her Master’s degree from Ithaca College. Both degrees were in music theory and composition. Ms. Schmidt has studied with Nadia Boulanger, Louise Talma, Karel Husa, Steven Stucky, and James Ming.

She is published by Theodore Presser and through Martha Helen Schmidt Music. Ms. Schmidt has taught piano, flute, voice, and theory/composition at the elementary, secondary, and college levels. She loves writing Art Songs and has had premieres in the United States as well as in Paris and Fontainebleau, France. She currently teaches secondary vocal music in the Twin Cities area.

Leanne Boschman

Leanne Boschman is a prairie transplant to the West coast where she works as a writer of poetry, fiction, and as post-secondary educator. Her poems have appeared in several anthologies, including Poems from Planet Earth, Force Field: 77 Women Poets of British Columbia, and Rocksalt: An Anthology of Contemporary BC Poetry. She has also published in journals including Prism International, Room, Geist Magazine, and Dandelion Magazine. In 2009, she published a collection of poetry Precipitous Signs: A Rain Journal with Leaf Press.

Glenn Sutherland

Composer Glenn Sutherland has studied with Michael Trew, Lane Price, and Jocelyn Morlock. His instrumental, choral and works for voice have been performed by soloists, ensembles and orchestras both in Canada and in Europe. Winnipeg’s award-winning Esprit de Choeur, performed a commissioned piece as part of the 2015 Tapestry International Festival for Women’s Voices. He was the CMC’s Emerging Composer (Prairie Region) competition winner for 2016, and has been published by Mayfair Music and Avondale Press.

JC Cortens

A poet and educator who lives in Vancouver, JCortens has long taught Burning Karma, a seminar exploring writing from memory and life experience for novice writers.

His poems have appeared in the journal The Maynard. He participated in a collaborative writing project Poetic Pairings hosted by Pandora’s Collective in Spring 2017. He presented at Light within the Shadows: Celebrating Pnina Granirer in December 2017.

His first collection of poems exploring the search for love in a fractured world, is searching for a home. He is collecting fragments entitled Every Scar is a Story exploring collective experiences of the gaymale communities.

Carolyn Quick

Carolyn A. Quick (b. 1994) is a native northwest composer and vocalist. Her music has been described as “sensitive” and “evocative” of “streams of light” (Canadian Music Centre BC), often mixing elements of tonality and lyricism to create rich textural landscapes; and her compositions feature a wide variety of both instrumental and vocal ensembles including works for choir, wind ensemble, symphony orchestra, and various other chamber groups.

Her works have been read and premièred throughout North America and Europe by various ensembles including the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, the Erato Ensemble, the Illini Strings, and the Vancouver Opera’s Young Artist Program.

Jonathan Daniel

Jonathan Daniel is a young Kansas City-based composer with a penchant for the weird, the whimsical, and the philosophical. A Choral Scholar and Oxbridge student at William Jewell College, he currently studies musicology and philosophy. He completed a year at Regent’s Park College (University of Oxford, U.K.) studying with David Stuart. He currently studies with Ian Coleman and Anthony Maglione. Known in the Kansas City area for his choral singing and choral compositional voice, Jonathan’s choral music has been performed and recorded by groups like the William Jewell College Choral Scholars (Liberty, MO) and The Choral Project (San Jose, CA).

felicia klingenberg

I have been writing poetry since I was eight years old, when I won an award for a poem on water safety. As an adult I extended my work into personal essays and memoir. My work has appeared in a variety of small publications and I led creative writing workshops for more than twenty years. In 2007 I started learning operatic singing, and since then I have written two opera libretti, one at the request of my artsonglab 2015 collaborator, Kaley Lane Eaton. Another artsonglab 2015 composer, Katya Pine, is well into composing my other libretto.

Judy Specht

Judy Specht composes music for solo instruments and ensembles, and electronic scores for theatre. She began playing piano at age 5, eventually adding accordion and flute, which she played for many years while performing as a multi-instrumentalist with the theatre troupe, The Trollsons. She has an A.R.C.T. degree (piano) and holds B.MUS and M.MUS degrees (composition) from UBC. She taught theory at the University of Ottawa and at Douglas College/Langara, and piano at her own studio in Vancouver before retiring to Gabriola Island to devote herself to composing and listening to the seagulls and the surf.

mia susan amir

mia susan amir works at the intersection of creative and community practice as an educator, cultural organizer, writer, and theatre artist creating immersive, interdisciplinary, and site-specific works. mia’s writing has appeared on SpiderWebShow, Lemon Hound, Digging Through the Fat, and in Sustenance: An Anthology of Writers from B.C. and Beyond on the Subject of Food, Anvil Press. mia is the Creative Director of The Story We Be, the Associate Dramaturg at PTC, and a Dramaturg with the Virago Play Series. She lives and works on the unceded and occupied territories of the x?m?θkw?y??m (Musqueam), Skwxwu?7mesh (Squamish), and S?l?i?lw?ta?/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations.

Patrick McGraw

Toronto-based composer Patrick McGraw was born in the United States but has made Canada his home since 2001. An early interest in the sciences led him to a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the California Institute of Technology, but the pull of his other great love, music, proved irresistible and he returned to school to study composition with David Mott and Gary Kulesha. He was awarded the Karen Kieser Prize in Canadian Music for his string quartet Glass in 2014. Although music is now his primary focus, he remains active in the sciences as a teacher.

Kagan Goh

Kagan Goh is an award-winning filmmaker, published author, spoken word poet, and mental health advocate and activist. Kagan has been published in numerous anthologies, periodicals and magazines. Select Books in Singapore published his first book, Who Let in the Sky? Goh is also an award-winning documentary filmmaker with a number of releases, including the award-winning Mind Fuck (1996) and Stolen Memories (2012). His films have been broadcast on national television and gained entry into respected film festivals across Canada. His personal mission is to educate people about mental health issues and fight the stigma against the mentally ill.

Steven Webb

Steven Webb is a Toronto based performer, composer, and audio engineer, who recently completed his Masters in Composition at the University of Toronto under the direction of Dr. Christos Hatzis. Steven has written music for a variety of films and commercials, as well as for contemporary dance and classical performance. His compositions and arrangements have been performed across North America and Europe, and include performances by: The Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, The UofT Symphony Orchestra, The University of Guelph Symphonic Choir, Prairie Voices Choir, Exultate Chamber Choir, and at the Conservatory of Music Giuseppe Tartini in Trieste, Italy. As a film composer, Steven has worked on a variety of projects including ‘Chopin’s Heart’ for The National Screen Institute, which played at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, ‘Period Piece’, winner of the best Canadian Short Film at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival, and ‘Scheduled Violence’ for MTS On Demand. He currently works as a full time composer, audio engineer and collaborative pianist.

Arturo Fernandez

Arturo Fernandez is a native of Miami, Florida. He has had his compositions performed by groups such as the Ludovico Ensemble, the Fifth Floor Collective, and the Boston Conservatory orchestra under the direction of Yoichi Udagawa. He has also had compositions premiered at various summer music festivals, including the New York Summer Music Festival, the Atlantic Music Festival, Sienna Summer Music in Italy, and ASL 2014. He is a graduate of the Boston Conservatory and the Cleveland Institute of Music, and is a recent doctoral graudate of the College-Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati.

Cory Philley

Cory is a writer, performer, director and producer and has worked as a theatre artist for more than 30 years. Cory’s writing credits include Peaches & Scream (co-written with Mercedes Baines), the award winning Marking Time, Faith, Bob, Contrary, Sorry, Scarlet, Late, Slippage, and Fever Cabaret. As a performer, favourite acting credits include Mud & Men Inside (Ruby Slippers Productions), Bad Dollies (Women in View Festival) Her Big Break (These 4 Walls Productions), By Choice (Twelve Minutes Max), Faith and Bob (La Luna Productions) and Slippage (Wild Filly Productions).

Cory is the Theatre and Events Services Coordinator at the Shadbolt Centre for the Arts in Burnaby where she is the Artistic Director for the Shadbolt’s theatre season, directs the Artist-in-Residency program and manages Special events and concerts in Deer Lake Park. Cory was one of the founding members and co-artistic director of La Luna Productions (1998-2007).

Cory is a graduate of the Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts and she has just completed her MA in Graduate Liberal Studies program at SFU. Her thesis project was her play, Hoarding Paradise, about a woman with Compulsive Hoarding Disorder.

Katerina Gimon

Katerina Gimon is an award-winning and emerging Canadian composer, improvisor, and experimental vocalist based in Vancouver. Recently named as one of Canada's hot 30 classical musicians under 30 by CBC, her compositions have been broadcast and presented across Canada, the United States (most notably at Carnegie Hall), and Europe. Katerina currently serves on the board of The Association of Canadian Women Composers and is an Associate Composer at the Canadian Music Centre (currently the youngest associate). She continues to performs regularly as part of experimental mixed-media ensemble Chroma of which she is a founding member (vocals, extended vocals, and electronics).

Contralto, Lynne McMurtry

Described as “a force of nature” (Toronto Star) and “an actress of immense talent” (Opera Canada), contralto Lynne McMurtry is happiest when rehearsing powerful words set to evocative music, which is why she loves Art Song Lab.  Recent opera performances include Mistress Quickly in Verdi’s Falstaff with Calgary Opera and Marcellina in Le Nozze di Figaro with Opera Lyra.  In the concert realm she dreams of singing more of Das Lied von der Erde (Mahler) and the Alto Rhapsody by Brahms, both of which she performed with orchestra recently.  She teaches at the State University of New York College at Fredonia and is a Founding Faculty Artist of the Vancouver International Song Institute.

Pianist, Rachel Iwaasa

Hailed in the press as a "keyboard virtuoso and avant-garde muse" (Georgia Straight) with the “emotional intensity” to take a piece “from notes on a page to a stunning work of art” (Victoria Times Colonist), pianist Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa has performed as soloist and chamber musician in Canada, the United States, the Netherlands and Germany. Known for bold and innovative concerts, Rachel combines her warmth and curiosity to touch the hearts and minds of audiences, whether she is playing Beethoven and Schumann or Ligeti and Saariaho.

One half of the flute/piano duo Tiresias with Mark McGregor, Rachel has also performed with Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Judith Forst, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw and Richard Reed Parry of Arcade Fire. Rachel has appeared for Muziekweek Gaudeamus, Music TORONTO, Vancouver New Music, Music on Main, Redshift, the Western Front, the Victoria Symphony, the Aventa Ensemble (Victoria), CONTACT contemporary music (Toronto), New Works Calgary, Groundswell New Music (Winnipeg), and Vancouver Pro Musica. Rachel has a shameless passion for contemporary music, and has performed numerous premières, including pieces written especially for her by Rodney Sharman, Jeffrey Ryan, Jocelyn Morlock, Emily Doolittle, Alexander Pechenyuk, and many other Canadian composers. Rachel’s debut solo CD, Cosmophony, piano music inspired by the cosmos, was released in 2010 on Redshift Records. Praised by the Vancouver Sun as “brilliant” and “unforgettable” and nominated for a Western Canadian Music Award, Cosmophony features the Canadian premiere recording of George Crumb’s Makrokosmos, Volume II and no less than nine commissioned works by Canadian composers.

Rachel is one half of the flute/piano duo Tiresias with Mark McGregor. Their debut CD, Delicate Fires, was nominated for a 2008 Western Canadian Music Award. Delicate Fires was produced with the generous assistance of the Barbara Pentland fund, and features the first commercially released recordings of her Sonata Fantasy for solo piano and Trance for flute and piano. It also presents the premiere recordings of works commissioned by Tiresias from Canadian composers Rodney Sharman, Jennifer Butler, and Jocelyn Morlock. Tiresias’s sophomore recording was double CD released in 2013: Trade Winds, showcasing the works of BC composers Jean Coulthard, Paul Douglas and Christopher Kovarik, paired with Halos of the Moon, exploring Japanese-Canadian hybridity in music with works by Toru Takemitsu, Jo Kondo, Eliot Weisgarber, Anthony Genge, Derek Charke, Hiroki Tsuromoto and Kara Gibbs.

Rachel’s major teachers were Jane Coop, Menahem Pressler, and Robin Wood. She holds a Doctor of Musical Arts from the University of British Columbia, a Master of Music from Indiana University, and a Bachelor of Music from the University of Victoria, where she earned the Victoria Medal as the top graduating student in Fine Arts. She was also a two-time recipient of the prestigious Annual Grant from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) for graduate studies at the Hochschule für Musik "Hanns Eisler" Berlin. Other awards include numerous grants from the Canada Council, the BC Arts Council, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Alberta Heritage Foundation. Rachel is a founder of the Queer Arts Festival, regarded as one of the top 5 festivals of its kind worldwide.

Pianist, Alison d'Amato

Pianist Dr. Alison d'Amato is a dynamic and versatile musician, committed to performing and teaching in the full spectrum of collaborative musical genres. A valued colleague and innovative mentor, she is Artistic Co-Director of Florestan Recital Project (www.florestanproject.org), Assistant Professor of Vocal Coaching at Eastman School of Music, and Clinical Assistant Professor at University at Buffalo. In all these activities, Alison is dedicated to energizing the relationships and communication inherent in music.

As both a pianist and teacher, Alison has developed several projects that explore interdisciplinary collaborations and new approaches to the performer-audience relationship. She is Program Director of Art Song Lab (www.artsonglab.com), an intensive workshop that presents new works in collaboration with composers, poets, and performers. Alison has been a guest artist at The AmBul Festival (Sofia, Bulgaria), SOURCE Song Festival, University of Toronto, Tufts University, Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, SUNY Fredonia, University of Minnesota, and Boston Conservatory. In addition to traditional masterclasses, Alison has shared classes with musicologists, English professors, singers, and instrumentalist partners. She has pursued that interdisciplinary approach in performance, notably with a Florestan/Maine State Ballet collaboration of “The Poet’s Love,” a highly-acclaimed original presentation of Schumann’s Dichterliebe with original choreography. 

Recent recording projects include The Complete Songs of Virgil Thomson (New World Records) and Music for Violin and Piano by Joseph Achron with violinist Michael Ludwig (Naxos). Recent concert activities include programs at the Schubert Club (St. Paul, MN), premieres with Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP), Wordsong, and the Buffalo Chamber Players, and recitals with acclaimed soprano Tony Arnold.