BAhlest eeble Composer Fellows
2018

Beatrice Ferreira

Beatrice is a Montreal-based composer and violist. Whether writing or performing music, Beatrice strives to create work that is thoughtful and personal. Born on a farm in rural Pennsylvania, she grew up competing in fiddle festivals across the state. Her interest in composition began while working as a songwriter for the Philadelphia neo-soul band, Bibi and the Bull, and her background in popular music has led her to explore and prioritize music-as-activism.
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Iman Habibi

Iman Habibi, D.M.A. (Michigan) is an Iranian-Canadian composer and pianist, and co-founder of the piano duo ensemble, Piano Pinnacle. He has received commissions from The Philadelphia Orchestra and Boston Symphony Orchestra, twice attained the First Prize at the SOCAN Awards, as well as International POLYPHONOS award, and The Vancouver Mayor’s Arts Award.
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Jessica Hunt

Jessica Hunt (b. 1987) has been commissioned by the Philadelphia Orchestra (Climb), the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra (The Eagle Tree), the Gaudete Brass Quintet (seven works), Detroit Chamber Winds and Strings, The Michigan Lighthouse Landmark Legacy Project, Access Contemporary Music, and many others; has served as the 2018 Boontling Community Fellow at the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music and as the 2017-18 Young Composer in Residence with the Detroit Chamber Winds and Strings; and was awarded a Regents Fellowship at the University of Michigan, where she completed her doctoral studies in 2019.
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Bonnie McLarty

Bonnie McLarty is a composer and collaborative pianist who currently divides her time between rural Washington State and the Kansas City area. She is currently a lecturer of music theory at the University of Kansas and also offers private composition lessons and piano instruction.
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Antonio Celaya

I was born and raised in Tucson. I heard little of the European canon growing up, but heard Yaqui Deer Dance, Mariachi, Chicken Scratch, Norteña and Country Western music. In college (1974-1979) I studied Swedish and Danish choral music intensively. The school produced fine marching band directors, but there was no composition program. I worked on my own, composing for choreographers and creating tape music on the school’s barely functioning Moog. After college I worked a year for the Bach and Madrigal Society (now Charles Bruffy’s Phoenix Chamber Choir). After the choir job ended, I became office secretary for a Flamenco troupe. I studied flamenco dance and rhythm. Soon they ran out of money. I then worked in a tortilla factory, picked citrus and cleaned in a nursing home. I saved my money to go to Sweden or Denmark to study composition and immerse myself Nordic choral music. I never earned enough for my adventure. In 1982 Phoenix there was not even talk of New Music in my life. I wrote less and less. I was on my way to being a self-declared “artist” who had not created a work in 50 years. I emerged from my time lost in a dark wood after law school (that’s another story).

Coming to the Bay Area in 1987, I studied privately, revisiting counterpoint and harmony with Berkeley composer Larry London. I studied composition with Mexican composer Arturo Salinas, Elinor Armer, and voice with Cheryl Keller. In 1995 my day job was driving me towards the edge, so I took a leave of absence and spent two months in Bali, writing music and learning about the structure of Balinese music. The real lesson was meeting phenomenal musicians, painters, sculptors and dancers who worked the rice fields, all artists of the highest order. I saw music could be a deeply embedded part of a culture. Bali saved my sanity. In recent years I’ve had a number of performances, including one at a NACUSA national convention, and at Portland’s March Music Moderne Festival, which commissioned two pieces including my first electronic work in 35 years. I am on the verge of emerging into some new phase.

Jonah Gallagher

Jonah M. Gallagher (b. '93) is a composer of concert music born and raised in the suburbs of Chicago, Illinois. He received his Master's degree from the San Francisco Conservatory of Music where he studied with Mason Bates. He has additionally studied with Robert Denham, Alex Lu, and Mike Watts. Receiving both national and international recognition, his music has been performed in domestically in Detroit, L.A., Oakland, San Francisco, Miami, and Chicago, as well as internationally in Seoul, South Korea and Vienna, Austria. Most recently the Oakland Symphony, under the direction of Michael Morgan, premiered his piece for string orchestra, Vocare. Morgan says about Gallagher’s music, “I find him a really compelling new voice capable of writing music of great virtuosity contrasting with a great American lyricism.”
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Jay Hurst

Jay Hurst (b. 1989) is an Indiana-based composer of concert, film, and electronic music. His musical world was influenced by an early interest in film and video game scores, which gradually grew to include a love of natural sounds and of the sounds of machinery and electronics. The focus in his work is on sculpting sound in space, with attention paid to the theatrical and the atmospheric elements of performance. His music has been performed by ensembles such as the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, Indiana University Concert Orchestra, Indiana University New Music Ensemble, Tower Duo, and Square Peg Round Hole.
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Erika Oba

Erika Oba is a composer, pianist/flutist, and educator based in the SF Bay Area. As a composer she has written works for big band, small jazz ensembles, chamber groups, dance and theater. She is active as a performer on both piano and flute, and is a member of the Montclair Women’s Big Band, Ends Meat’ Catastrophe Jazz Ensemble, Rice Kings, and The Sl(e)ight Ensemble and has performed with the Hitomi Oba Ensemble, Peter Apfelbaum's Sparkler, and Jason Levis and Lisa Mezzacappa’s Duo B Experimental Band. She has worked as a dance accompanist for Mills College and Berkeley Ballet Theater, and is currently a resident music director with Berkeley Playhouse’s Youth Conservatory Program. In addition to her own private teaching studio, she is a private jazz piano instructor for UC Berkeley’s Music Department.
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Sid Richardson

Composer Sid Richardson (b. 1987) writes concert music that imbues modern idioms with emotional grit and cerebral wit. His work explores the intersections of music and literature, drawing inspiration from the works of such writers as Beckett, Catullus, Chaucer, Garréta, Longfellow, Keats, Mackey, Rimbaud, Rossetti, and Shepard to create a style that focuses on harmony and timbre. Richardson leverages pre-existing texts to create a metaphorical resonance with the source material in pieces that weave literary elements into formal, rhythmic, and harmonic structures.
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Aeryn Santillan

Aeryn Jade Santillan (she/her) is a composer, guitarist, and bassist whose work is heavily influenced by the DIY punk scene and actively aims to blur the lines between band/ensemble and song/composition. Aeryn performs bass in the New Jersey based, internationally touring screamo quartet, Massa Nera. Along with composer/guitarist Andrew Noseworthy, she co-founded this place is actually the worst, an experimental mathcore duo, and post-genre DIY label, people | places | records.
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Anjna Swaminathan

Anjna Swaminathan is a queer multidisciplinary composer, musician, and theatre artist. Anjna’s work exists at the nexus of multiple creative disciplines, simultaneously leaning into the rigor available within each form while seeking release from form entirely. As an artist with a passion for social critique, community building, and critical consciousness, Anjna’s artistic practice is an extension of an activist spirit. Thus, her/their work uses expression and storytelling to forge connections across cultural, economic, gendered, racial, and sexual identities and communities. Anjna is a disciple of the late violin maestro Parur Sri M.S. Gopalakrishnan and Mysore Sri H.K. Narasimhamurthy. In 2015, Anjna came under the tutelage of renowned vocalist and scholar, T.M. Krishna for training in Carnatic music, and vocalist Samarth Nagarkar for training in Hindustani music and accompaniment.
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Nicolas Lell Benavides

Nicolas Lell Benavides’ (Ben-ah-VEE-des) music has been praised for finding “…a way to sketch complete characters in swift sure lines…” (Anne Midgette, Washington Post) and cooking up a “jaunty score [with] touches of cabaret, musical theater and Latin dance.” (Tim Smith, OPERA NEWS). He has worked with groups such as the Washington National Opera, The Glimmerglass Festival, New Opera West, West Edge Opera, Nashville Opera, Shreveport Opera, Left Coast Chamber Ensemble, Friction Quartet, Khemia Ensemble, and Nomad Session.
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Adeliia Faizullina

​Adeliia (Adele) Faizullina (b.1988) is a Tatar composer, vocalist, multi-instrumentalist and quray player. As a composer, she explores cutting-edge vocal colors and paints delicate and vibrant atmospheres inspired by the music and poetry of Tatar folklore. The Washington Post has praised her compositions as "vast and varied, encompassing memory and imagination." Her recent commissions include works for Jennifer Koh, the Tesla Quartet, Johnny Gandelsman, and the Metropolis Ensemble. Her works have also been performed by the Seattle Symphony, cellist Ashley Bathgate, the Del Sol Quartet, and Duo Cortona. She won the Seattle Symphony Celebrate Asia Competition in 2019, she won first prize in the Radio Orpheus Young Composers Competition in Moscow in 2018. Adeliia received her BM in Voice in Kazan, Russia, and BM in Music Composition in Gnessins Russian Academy of Music. She has an MM in Music Composition from the University of Texas at Austin, and in 2021 will be pursuing her PhD in Music & Multimedia Composition at Brown University.
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Danny Gouker

Danny is a trumpet player currently in Brooklyn, New York, where he is active in the improvised music scene. He released his debut album in 2014 on the pfMentum record label with Signal Problems, a long-standing group with a unique way of improvising, guided by Danny’s compositions. Signal Problems recently released a recording "Love Letter" in June 2018, a conceptual piece that seems to tell a different story each time it's performed. He leads additional projects under his name, featuring his compositions: “DG’s Misfit Toys”, and “DG’s Dog and Pony Show” and released a recording for 3 trumpets and 3 basses entitled “Sanctuary” on the pfMENTUM label in the fall of 2017.
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Stanton Nelson

Stanton Nelson, organist and composer at Highland Park United Methodist Church, comes from Long Island, Kansas. He has released four albums, which can be found on many streaming and purchasing websites: Genesis, From the Launchpad, On This Journey, Respite, and With These People. Mr. Nelson is also the first prize winner of many piano competitions, including the Hays Young Artist’s Competition 1st Prize Winner (’11), Kansas City SAI Scholarship Competition Top Prize Winner (’10), and Robert M. Spire Solo Piano Competition 1st Prize Winner (’08). He has also been selected for two prestigious positions, one of the two vocal coaches for the University of Michigan production of Dead Man Walking in 2014 and the pianist for the University of Kansas Wind Ensemble performance in Carnegie Hall (2012).

Dawn Norfleet

Dr. Dawn Norfleet is a Los Angeles-based composer, flutist, and vocalist committed to issues of arts, access, and diversity. She’s an alumna of Wellesley College and earned an M.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University in Musical Composition and Ethnomusicology, respectively. As a Jazz Composers Orchestra Institute Fellow, her orchestra piece, Seed, was selected for an American Composers Orchestra reading in New York City; Seed was later premiered by the Bloomington Symphony. In 2020, Dr. Norfleet was commissioned by ACO to compose for Brazilian-American musician, Clarice Assad. She also composed Chicaneries for solo viola, which was commissioned and premiered in South Carolina. As a GLFCAM Chou Wen-chung Fellow (2018-19), she worked with Molly Morkoski, Jessica Rivera, and Duo Cortona. In 2022-23, she joins the GLFCAM collective, “Composing Earth”. A compositional polyglot, her influences include jazz, Western, and global polyphony. “Dr. Dawn” mentors high school composers and musicians through Luna Composition Lab and the NAACP.
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Timothy Peterson

Timothy Peterson’s music has been performed in the US, Europe, and Australia at venues ranging from art galleries and distilleries to concert halls such as Lincoln Center. His works have been featured at events such as the New York Philharmonic School Day Concerts, the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival at MASS MoCA, the N.E.O. Voice Festival, the North American Saxophone Alliance Biennial Conference, Hartford Opera Theater’s New In November festival, and One Ounce Opera’s Fresh Squeezed Ounce of Opera festival.
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Akshaya Avril Tucker

Akshaya Avril Tucker is a composer who draws inspiration from the music and dance traditions of South Asia, having trained as a cellist and Odissi dancer from a young age. Recent commissions and projects include works for Johnny Gandelsman (Brooklyn Rider), WindSync, Marianne Gedigian, Hindustani vocalist Saili Oak, Duo Cortona, Englewinds, invoke string quartet, Thalea String Quartet and Density512. In 2019, she won an ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award. She also received an honorable mention from ASCAP in 2018, was a finalist for the award again in 2020, and received an honorable mention from National Sawdust’s Hildegard Competition in 2018.
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James Diaz

Colombian composer/sound maker James Diaz, currently based in Philadelphia/New York, composes music that strives to create unique sonic textures, sound masses, and interactive environments. Deeply influenced by the concept of psychedelia, his music also draws from elements of architecture, Latin-America landscapes, graphic design, and photography.
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Rachel Epperly

Rachel Epperly is a composer, performer, and improviser who is passionate about continually stretching the boundaries of vulnerability in her work. Her music has been performed by esteemed ensembles such as the Grand Rapids Symphony, The Grand Rapids Ballet company, Face the Music Ensemble, and the Castalia Quartet. Rachel is also a pianist, experimental vocalist, melodica-ist, and has just acquired an accordion. As a performer, Rachel recently attended Silk Road Ensemble's Global Musician Workshop and is a member of an experimental improvisation trio, Glitter Glam. Her work is inspired by a wide array of artists including Jenny Hval, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Aksak Maboul, and Winston Tong. One of her recent musical interests is exploring her ambivalent relationship with gender norms that she has internalized. She is currently in her final year of her bachelors in composition and is studying with Evan Chambers. Her past teachers have included Alexander Miller, Kurt Ellenberger, Kristin Kuster, Erik Santos, and Bright Sheng.
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Colin Payne

Colin Payne's music has been described as "creating a symbiosis of drama and texture where the jagged edges of city life seamlessly connect with beautiful serene images among nature". Surrounded by the sounds of Detroit from an early age, he was immersed in styles, such as the Motown sound of Hitsville, USA, the jazz of Russel Street and Baker's Keyboard Lounge, and the classical music of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. His compositions have been performed at venues and festivals in both Europe and the United States with premieres in New York City, Detroit, Chicago, Florence, Milan, Pavia, Stuttgart, and Siena.
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Marco-Adrián Ramos

Marco-Adrián Ramos (1995) is a Mexican-American composer and arranger who has written for a variety of media including works for voice, instrumental and electroacoustic ensembles, and dance. He has attended the European-American Musical Alliance, the Bowdoin International Music Festival, the Next Festival of Emerging Artists, and the Aspen Music Festival; composers with whom he has had the pleasure of working include Christopher Lacy, Robert Beaser, Christopher Rouse, Derek Bermel, Mari Kimura, Christopher Theofanidis, Stephen Hartke, Aaron Jay Kernis, and Arturo Márquez.
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Karalyn Schubring

Although Karalyn Schubring (b. 1999) started playing piano at three and composing at six years old as a student at the East Valley Yamaha Music School, it was not until she saw a performance by powerhouse jazz pianist Hiromi as a preteen that she finally understood the joy of making music. Since that lightbulb moment, her aim has been to invite others to experience the joys of creativity through musical exploration as a composer and pianist.
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Steve Juliani

Steven Juliani (b. 1960) started composing music in 2016 after a long career in music as a professional horn player and as a music copyist. Since then, his music has been performed throughout the United States and in Australia. In 2020, during Covid, the Sheffield Chamber Players, performed Juliani's work, Three Melodies, in five live streamed performances. An elite group of brass musicians from the National Symphony, Kennedy Center Opera Orchestra and the President's Own Marine Band recorded and released on YouTube Juliani's fanfare for brass and percussion, 2020, and Mark Almond, Associate Principal Horn of the San Francisco Symphony, released videos of two of Juliani's works for 6 horns: Sarabande and Final Words.
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