Chanan Ben Simon

U.S./Israel

Chanan Ben Simon is a vocalist, composer, and multimedia artist whose work moves between experimental practices and song. His recent projects include the album Star Inside and a TV opera of the same name, created with Inkyoung Bae and presented in Seoul, South Korea. He is also a co-creator of Ancestors Dance Too, a collaboration with Guy Barash exploring Jewish text and Middle Eastern traditions through voice and electronics. Ben Simon performs contemporary and improvised music, including works by Meredith Monk and Joan La Barbara. He holds a BMus in Multidisciplinary Composition from the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance and an MFA in Performance and Interactive Media Arts from Brooklyn College.

Santiago Botero

Colombia

Santiago Botero is a double bassist, improviser, and composer working across free improvisation, experimental music, and popular traditions. His practice centers on collaborative projects where the double bass becomes a physical and expanded instrument, shaped through electronics, extended techniques, and collective interaction. He co-leads “BoteroDelgado” and develops projects such as “El Ombligo” and “El Arco Expandido,” exploring the intersections of composition, improvisation, and sound experimentation. His work has been shaped through collaborations and exchanges with artists such as Peter Brötzmann, Tony Malaby, Wade Matthews, Katie Duck, and Carmelo Torres, reflecting a practice that moves fluidly between scenes, traditions, and experimental approaches.

Miles Jefferson Friday

U.S.

Miles Jefferson Friday is an artist who focuses on sound as his primary medium. Composing music, creating immersive installations, and building new instruments, Miles’s practice invites us to reconsider how we hear and experience sound. His work creates spaces for collective listening, exploring how sonic experience shifts across bodies, histories, and contexts. In this way, sound becomes a site for community-building, critical exchange, and play. Miles is an Assistant Professor of Digital Music at UT San Antonio and holds degrees from Cornell University, the Eastman School of Music, and Indiana University.

Christina Fuchs

Germany

Christina Fuchs, Alum-in-Residence, a composer, conductor, and performer of saxophones and clarinets, studied German literature and history in Freiburg, and then composition in Cologne with Joachim Ullrich and Siegfried Koepf, Maria Schneider, with Jim McNeely in New York, and George Russell in Boston. She has received national and international rewards in composition and works in a variety of ensembles in such diverse fields as New Music, Theatre, Improvised Music, and Jazz. Her work includes traditional concerts as well as collaborations with other art forms, such as dance, visual arts, literature, spoken word, documentaries and theatre. What is common to all of these settings is Fuchs’ emphasis on blending written and improvised music.

Seon-Ah Jo

South Korea

Seon-Ah Jo creates music and performance works informed by artistic lineages passed down through the Korean peninsula. Beginning with gayageum practice, she works with movement, field recording, recorded sound, and embodied improvisation. Drawing from Korean traditional performing arts—music, dance, and ritual performance—she works with gestures, repetition, and sonic structure. She treats the body as a space where sound, memory, and inherited forms move, register, and gather over time.

Leah King

U.S.

Leah King is a multimedia artist and DJ who works with collage, sound, film, and performance. In an ongoing exploration of presence, her work leans into repetition as a form of stability. An electronic music composer with a background in nightlife studies, she creates abstracted works with repeated sonic and visual components that celebrate bodies in motion. By reworking archival materials, interviews, field recordings, and found objects, King reframes histories into sites of reverence, joy, and recovery.

Ignat Khlobystin

Russia/Switzerland

Ignat Khlobystin, a flutist, improviser, and composer from St. Petersburg (now based in Basel), moves between contemporary composition, improvisation, and performance.
A graduate of the St. Petersburg Conservatory, he co-founded Just Ensemble, dedicated to new and avant-garde music, and is a laureate of the John Cage Interpretation Competition. In Basel, he co-organizes JIMBA, an open platform for improvised music. His interest in how individual voices form a shared language he has developed through the Open Creation program at the Basel Academy of Music and his earlier work with the St. Petersburg Improvisation Orchestra.

Francesca Naibo

Italy

Francesca Naibo is an Italian guitarist, improvisor, researcher and educator. She moves fluently across all the different conjugations of the guitar and she’s particularly interested in using both the acoustic and the electric nature of her instrument, adventuring from roaring drones to microscopic vibrations.

She has released two solo albums—“Namatoulee” and “So Much Time”—and since 2020 she’s been an active member of “Conserere” Collective in Milan. In 2023 she was included in Fall Equinox 2023 Cohort 6 of Mutual Mentorship for Musicians and in 2025 she obtained Deep Listening® Teaching Certification.

Nikki

Argentina/Japan

Nikki is a Buenos Aires–based visual artist and music producer with roots in Okinawa, Japan. Her interdisciplinary practice spans sculpture, performance, music production, and multimedia installation. She explores themes of embodiment, avatars, prosthetics, and affective technologies, navigating the boundaries between human and non-human experience. Her work engages with storytelling and speculative fiction, addressing spirituality in digital contexts and the vulnerability of the voice. Influenced by 90s/00s anime and bass music, she recently began releasing music under the alias Nikki. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at ZKM, Hangar Barcelona, EAC Espacio de Arte Contemporáneo, and La Becque.

Bonita Oliver

U.S.

Bonita Oliver is an improvisor, interdisciplinary artist and astrologer exploring ancestral memory, somatic ritual, and the political geography of the body. Through performance, activism, and immersive installations, she creates restorative counter-archives to clear historical trauma and facilitate communal transformation. Her work centers Black American lineages, bridging tactile traditions with experimental technology. A Harlem-based filmmaker and member of SAG-AFTRA and ASCAP, Oliver (also performing as French Leave) honors the legacies of her mentors, LuJuana Hood, Judyie Al-Bilali, Olivia Llano-Davis and Robert Biggs. Her practice serves as a reactive embodiment of internal and external stimuli, evolving the legacy of storytelling into the future.

Ghazar Teknejyan

Armenia

Ghazar (or Lazar) Teknejyan hails from Armenia. For as long as he can remember he was into art and creation, but is also professionally a lawyer. He started his artistic journey in his early school years, an outstanding kid with singing, acting, and dancing capacities, plus a lot of charisma and humor. Years have passed and though becoming wiser, and also depressed when noticing all the things happening around us, after school, he became very interested in folk music and became a member of a local folk orchestra where he started as drummer, then started to sing. Over seven years they performed many concerts in Armenia, France, Georgia, Russia, and the US. He’s now working to create his own studio to release his own songs, perhaps creating music videos as he is also a visual thinker.

Huichun Yang (楊惠鈞)

Taiwan

Huichun Yang (楊惠鈞), a Taiwanese experimental musician and technologist based in Brooklyn, NY, improvises with self-built wooden instruments, balloons, and mouth harps alongside electronics and computer processing, transforming bodily tension into sound. Through breath and touch, her performances use inner rhythm to build relationships between body and instrument. She has taught live coding at the Rhode Island School of Design and led workshops at the NYU ITP program. Her work has been presented at DIY venues and internationally at ICMC (Boston), Non-Event (Boston), Residual Noise (Providence), EESF (California), and the SOUND/IMAGE Festival (London). In 2025, she received a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.