An avid conversationalist, cellist- Herine Coetzee Koschak is on a lifelong quest to engage in meaningful and personal exchanges through music. Herine is a founding member of Fifth House Ensemble and is regularly heard on local and national radio stations and concert stages, as well as on the Cedille record label.
Mar Alzamora- Doublebassist, writer, and Certified Deep Listening® instructor. Co-founder of Paisaxe Ensemble. Her artistic research is based on multisensory exploration through soundwalks and music improvisation. Her poetry books, The Day That Had No Night and Instantáneas Blues, have been published under the Duende Gramático Editorial. Writer for the Latin American Experimental Music Platform (MUSEXPLAT) and last year released the SONICA podcast on Spotify. She holds a MA in Contemporary Arts from Simon Fraser University, a BA in Music from Arizona State University.
Martine Thomas is a violist and poet based in New York City. She began her Doctorate of Musical Arts at CUNY Graduate Center in Fall 2021 and she has a Masters in Viola Performance as well as a Bachelor of Arts in English from the Harvard-New England Conservatory dual degree program. She performs traditional classical music as a soloist and chamber musician, collaborates closely with composers, and plays creative and improvised music. Martine is also a poetry editor for Peripheries Journal and you can find her recent poetry in Lana Turner Journal and the Colorado Review.
Iris Chun-Tzu Chang (TW) is an artist and researcher currently based in Taiwan.
Like sound as clay, Iris crafts her work through drawing, poetry, installation, field recording and improvised performance. Exploring embodied perception at the thresholds between the tangible/ intangible, audible/inaudible, conscious/subconscious, her research focuses on the self- propagation of memory and the coexistence between humans and non-humans.
Christof Zürn is the founder of Creative Companion and musicthinking.com. He is the author of the Music Thinking Jam Cards (Bis Publishers, 2018) and The Power of Music Thinking (Bis Publishers, 2022) and the host of the podcast with the same name.
Yifeng Yvonne Yuan is 25 years old. She converts the frequency of herself losing socks into the frequency of the pitches; she weighs raindrops to decide the weight of her noteheads. She is a composer, born and raised in China, and currently lives in Los Angeles.
Yvonne graduated from UCLA with a Masters’s degree in Music Composition. She studied with Richard Danielpour, Ian Krouse, Kay Rhie and David Lefkowitz. Her works are performed in the U.S, Europe, and Asia.
Matt Hannafin is a New York–born, Portland-based percussionist active in experimental music, improvisation, and Iranian classical and traditional music. His teachers have included composer La Monte Young, Indian master singer Pandit Pran Nath, Persian tombak virtuoso Pejman Hadadi, tar and tombak master Kavous Shirzadian, and percussionists Jamey Haddad and Glen Velez. He is the artistic director of Extradition, a Portland-based ensemble and concert series.
Ben Zucker engages in acts of creative juxtaposition and speculation as a composer, audiovisual artist, and multi-instrumentalist. He has contributed to experimental music scenes across North American and the UK with concert works, albums, scores for media, and frequent performances on brass, percussion, voice, and electronics. For his work, he has been acclaimed as a “master of improvisation” (IMPOSE Magazine), and “more than a little bit remarkable” (Free Jazz Blog). He currently lives in Chicago, studying, teaching, and labor organizing as a doctoral student at Northwestern University.
Dani Lunn is a Los Angeles based intercultural and multidisciplinary artist whose current work explores the interrelationship between sound and movement. Holding a certification in Deep Listening®, her practice is grounded in dance, ritual theatre and music, including a BFA in Dance at CalArts and independent study in Bahia, Brazil. She is currently co-facilitating Rainbow Body Matrix in residence at the Electric Lodge in Venice, CA and grateful to be part of the Deep Listening community.
Sheri Wills– art historian and visual artist, deep listener, feminist thinker, collaborator, professor, mother of three