Graduate Students
Music & Multimedia Composition
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Isaac Barzso
Composer, improviser, and sound artist Isaac Barzso strives to explore the activity of placemaking and the transfer of data and methods of communication between different mediums, aiming to create music and multimedia art that exists in the space between. Heavily influenced by disparate aspects of pop culture, such as the textures of post-rock music and the structures of literature and film, his music often utilises techniques within computer-generated or computer-assisted composition to close the gap between acoustic and electronic media. Isaac’s work has been featured at venues such as the Darmstädter Ferienkurse, SEAMUS, NYC Electronic Music Festival, and ICMC. In 2023 he graduated with distinction (M.M.) from the Royal Conservatory of The Hague.
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Nicholas Bentz
Nick Bentz (b. 1994 - Charleston, SC) is a composer, violinist, and multimedia artist whose work is drawn to remote fringes and recesses of experience. In his work he seeks to render intimately personal spaces imbued with an individual sense of storytelling and narrative. His art centers around the blurring, juxtaposition, and amalgamation of stylistic idioms into singular sonic statements. Nick's music has been performed by leading artists including the Philadelphia Orchestra, International Contemporary Ensemble, and yMusic, and featured at Lincoln Center, Kimmel Center, and the Museum of Modern Art in Shanghai. Current projects include works for Ensemble Intercontemporain and Sandbox Percussion. Nick holds a BM in composition and violin and an MM in violin from the Peabody Institute, and an MM in composition from the University of Southern California.
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Kamari Carter
Kamari Carter (b. 1992; lives and works in NYC) is a producer, performer, sound designer, and installation artist primarily working with sound and found objects. Carter's practice circumvents materiality and familiarity through a variety of recording and amplification techniques to investigate notions such as space, systems of identity, oppression, control, and surveillance. Driven by the probative nature of perception and the concept of conversation and social science, he seeks to expand narrative structures through sonic stillness. Carter’s work has been exhibited at such venues as Automata Arts, MoMA, Mana Contemporary, Flux Factory, Fridman Gallery, Lenfest Center for the Arts, and Issue Project Room, to name a few. Carter holds a BFA in Music Technology from California Institute of the Arts and an MFA in Sound Art from Columbia University.
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Inga Chinilina
Inga is a composer, intermedia artist, and a pianist. Originally from Moscow, USSR, Inga holds a BM in Composition and Performance from Berklee College of Music and an MFA in Theory and Composition from Brandeis University. Among her interests there are early music, non-tempered sonorities, and live electronics.
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Adeliia Faizullina
Adeliia Faizullina is a Tatar composer, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist. She explores cutting-edge vocal colors and creates vibrant atmospheres praised as "vast and varied, encompassing memory and imagination" (The Washington Post). Her works have been performed by Jennifer Koh, the Tesla Quartet, Orpheus Radio Symphony, Seattle Symphony, Albany Symphony, Ashley Bathgate, and the Del Sol Quartet. Adeliia holds a BM in Voice from Kazan, Russia, a BM in Composition from Gnessins Russian Academy of Music, and a MM in Composition from the University of Texas at Austin.
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Lee Gilboa
Lee Gilboa is an Israeli composer, artist and audio engineer. She completed her BM at Berklee College of Music, and her MFA at Columbia University. In her work she uses speech, audio spatialization and vocal processing in order to address themes such as identity, gender, naming and objectification. Lee is co-curating CT::SWaM's ExChange series with Daniel Neumann and presented work in venues such as Qubit Gallery, The Cube at Virginia Tech, Fridman Gallery, Fourth World Festival, and Resonance FM Radio among others. Lee’s debut album was released by Contour Editions during the summer of 2019.
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Will Johnson
Will Johnson is an audio artist from the Bronx, New York. His work centers on blackness -- the material and immaterial conditions of space that shape sound into movement and historical record. He holds a B.A. in Interdisciplinary Studies from NYU-Gallatin. He is the recipient of the Jerome Foundation Fellowship for Sound Art/Composition (2018) and the McKnight Foundation Fellowship for Musicians (2019). His commercial work includes licensed sound for Acura, Beats Electronics, HBO and collaborative contributions to 2016 grammy-winning best electronic album Skin. His live performances have been commissioned by Lincoln Center, the Kitchen and MASS MoCA.
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Bonnie Han Jones
Bonnie Han Jones is a Korean-American improvising musician, poet, and educator working primarily with electronic sound and text. Her work explores noise, sonic identity, listening, and sound as knowledge. She received an MFA from Bard College in 2012 and was the 2018 recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award.
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James May
James May (b. 1994, Pittsburgh, PA) is a composer, improviser, teacher, and writer. His work explores unfurling, fragile spaces, generating unpredictable systems in which performers can dwell. He combines approaches such as improvisation environments, live electronics, notated scores, field recordings, extended vocal technique, and text, often inspired by the natural world or other art forms—especially film photography and literature. James is a member of Versipel New Music (New Orleans), has published writing in Sound American and RTÉ Culture, and was a 2024 Ucross Artist in Residence. He has collaborated on performances and recordings with Versipel, Apply Triangle, Hypercube, Chamber Choir Ireland and Paul Hillier, Birdfoot Festival, New Music on the Bayou, Stephanie Lamprea, Will Yager, Jamie Monck, the San Francisco Choral Artists, and Longleash. James was one of 12 recipients of the 2018-19 George J. Mitchell Scholarship, funding an MA in Experimental Sound Practice at University College Cork; prior, he earned an MM in Composition from the University of Louisville, and a BMus in Theory & Composition and a BA in English from The College of Wooster.
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Sofía Rocha
Sofía Rocha writes music of uncompromising emotional intensity while exploring cognition, randomness, rhythm, and counterpoint in post-tonal frameworks. Recent projects include new works for the International Contemporary Ensemble, Emory University Symphony Orchestra and New York Youth Symphony. Sofía is a PhD student in Music and Multimedia Composition at Brown and received her master’s in composition at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, studying primarily with Yotam Haber and Chen Yi. She received her BA from Gettysburg College, studying with Avner Dorman.
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Queen Scott
Queen D. Scott is an unconventional hip-hop educator and MC with a mission to empower and inspire authenticity from the stage to the classroom. As an artist, Queen D. Scott deftly combines her classical background as a pianist, her fluency in technology and production, and her lifelong fascination with wordplay to immerse you in her lyrical and musical storytelling. As an educator, Scott roots her teaching in the examination of cultural context and social trends that challenges her students to investigate art beyond technique to expand their creative expression through deep understanding and integrity. Queen D. Scott’s talent and expertise have taken her around the world as a teaching artist giving master classes and workshops in hip-hop history and lyrical analysis, as well as R&B and hip-hop vocal performance. Currently, Scott serves as a professor in the Ensemble Department at Berklee College of Music and has recently released a hip-hop/soul version of the Black National Anthem, "Lift Every Voice,” that is available on all streaming platforms.
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Jessica Shand
Jessica Shand is a performer-composer and researcher driven by the belief that music can expand our sensibilities. While her early love for dance eventually led her to pick up her primary instrument, the flute, her original solo and ensemble music now calls on an eclectic set of influences—from classical and jazz to electronic music and the avant-garde—to combine flutes, electronics, vocals, and more. She holds an M.S. in Media Arts and Sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2024) and a B.A. in Mathematics and Music from Harvard University (2022).
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Jake Sokolov-Gonzalez
Jake Sokolov-Gonzalez is a musician and educator from New York City whose practice is based equally in free improvisation and tedious technical labor. He’s currently working on very-close-miked, very quiet cello music; a distended piano score for a short film; and a rolling drum’n’bass visual record. He’s been teaching creative music in the NYC public schools since 2013. He produces pop and dance music under the name BABL.
Musicology & Ethnomusicology
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Jake Blount
Jake Blount (pronounced: blunt) is a Ph.D. student in Musicology & Ethnomusicology at Brown University with interests in Black folk music, Afrofuturism, and string band music. He is a Smithsonian Folkways recording artist whose work has garnered multiple nominations at the International Folk Music Awards, the Steve Martin Banjo Prize, and other recognitions. He has performed at venues including the Kennedy Center, Newport Folk Festival, and NPR’s Tiny Desk. His writing has appeared in publications including Rolling Stone, NPR and No Depression.
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Ruby Erickson
Ruby Erickson is a Ph.D. student at Brown University in the Department of Music. Her scholarly interests include music, migration, and diaspora; musics of the Black Atlantic; economic ethnomusicology; voice studies; and engaged research methods. Her current research centers on the music-making communities of Cape Verdean Americans in New England, and includes a collaborative podcasting project, Sounds from the Eleventh Star. You can learn more about Ruby at her personal website.
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Mohammad Geldi Geldi Nejad
Mohammad Geldi holds an M.A. in Ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University. His M.A. thesis examined how Iranian Turkmens claim a distinct bardic performance style relative to the culture of Turkmenistan.
Born and raised in the northeast Iranian city of Gonbad-e Kavoos, Mohammad Geldi trained under Turkmen music masters from childhood and today is a renowned bard and dutar player. He performs and records as “Oghlan Bakhshi” (child bard), an honorary title bestowed upon him at age ten by a council of Turkmen musicians. He has performed Turkmen music at festivals and world music programs across Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and North America.
Prior to his studies in the US, Mohammad Geldi earned an M.A. from the Turkmen Conservatory of Music, along with a B.A. from the State Music College, both in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan. Along with his family, he oversees a center for education in Turkmen musical traditions in Gonbad-e Kavoos. Both his research and his professional performing career thus overarch the cultural and political divides between post-Soviet Turkmenistan and the Turkmen Sahra and North Khorasan regions of Iran.
His research focuses on the dutar and bardic performance in Iran and Turkmenistan, addressing themes of transmission, oral history, the relationship between borders and music, identity, sound, and voice studies.
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Jordan Good
Jordan Good is a Ph.D. student in Musicology and Ethnomusicology at Brown University. Her research focuses on music and play, looking in particular at ludo-musical interfaces of instruments, toys, and games, as well as assumptions around "casual" gameplay or music-making. Her work intersects with fields such as ludomusicology, sound studies, and organology. She has presented various parts of her work at conferences including the annual meetings of the American Musicological Society and the North American Conference on Video Game Music. She has received a B.A. from NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study, as well as an M.A. in Musicology from Tufts University.
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Marcus Grant
Marcus Grant is a professional drummer, percussionist, musicologist, and educator from West Chester, Pennsylvania. He holds a BM in jazz performance from Temple University, an MM jazz performance and an MM in musicology from the University of Miami (FL). His research focuses on Black Lives Matter protest music and hip-hop, and the intersections of musical protest and digital culture. Other research interests include jazz studies and music in the Black church.
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Alexander Hardan
Alexander Hardan is a PhD candidate in Musicology & Ethnomusicology at Brown University. His dissertation, “Listening for Sovietization in Cold War Cuba,” explores the musical exchange between the USSR and Cuba following the Cuban Revolution, examining how this transnational dialogue found expression through musical performance. The dissertation argues that the “Russian School” of musical performance was instrumentalized as a discursive, affective, and institutional tool in replicating ideas of “Soviet greatness” in revolutionary Cuba, becoming an indexical conduit for the reinvention of national identity. Hardan’s writings have been published in the Journal of Musicology and the Journal of Popular Music Studies. In 2023 he was awarded the Howard Mayer Brown Fellowship from the American Musicological Society. He holds degrees in Violin Performance and Musicology from the Peabody Conservatory of the Johns Hopkins University, and an M.A. in Ethnomusicology from Brown University.
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Devanney Haruta
Devanney Haruta is a PhD candidate in Musicology & Ethnomusicology. Her research focuses on musical instruments, interfaces, and technologies, particularly as material objects embedded with cultural and personal meaning and as sites of interaction and experimentation. She earned an M.A. in Ethnomusicology from Wesleyan University, where she worked with the World Instrument Collection, and an A.B. in Music and Math from Brown University.
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Annie Kim
Annie is a Ph.D. candidate in Musicology & Ethnomusicology at Brown University. Her research sits at the cross-disciplinary intersections of voice, sound, and performance studies, with a particular attention to issues of race, gender, materiality, and technological mediation. Annie holds an M.A. in Music from Tufts University, where she completed a thesis titled, “Voice, Embodiment, Becoming: Camilla Williams’s Performances and Negotiations of Black Female Subjectivity from Butterfly to Bess.”
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Ravi Krishnaswami
Ravi Krishnaswami is a PHD student at Brown University studying how technology, business, and culture intersect in the work of creating music for advertising. He is an award-winning composer and sound-designer for advertising, television, and games, a business owner, and guitarist in NYC’s tribute to The Smiths. His composition work has appeared in the Super Bowl, on networks including ESPN and HBO, and in AAA video game soundtracks such as Fallout and Dishonored. He studies sitar with Srinivas Reddy, and recently premiered works for acoustic instruments and live processing, under the supervision of Lu Wang and Butch Rovan.
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Jay Loomis
I play and construct a variety of wind instruments that I make out of wood, ceramics, and 3D printed materials. I also compose and record my own works, often in parks and outdoor areas where I can combine the sound of flutes with the sonic environment that surrounds me, from cityscapes to mountain streams. Some research areas of interest include organology, flamenco, coloniality, critical race theory, indigeneity, and musics of the Americas.
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Shirley Mak
Shirley Mak is a Musicology/Ethnomusicology Ph.D. candidate at Brown University. Her dissertation research focuses on intercultural collaborative music making within the Silkroad Ensemble and Global Musician Workshop. Her interests also include issues of music and identity, the impact of globalization on music (including the diasporic and transnational in music studies, and world music), and the inclusion of postcolonial theories and global discourses in Western classical music pedagogy. She received her M.A. in Musicology from the University of Amsterdam, and her B.A. in Music from Queens College, CUNY.
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Christopher Newman
Christopher Newman is a Ph.D. student in the Musicology and Ethnomusicology program at Brown University. He is especially interested in the roles of music and sound in systems of inequality and, particularly, their intersections with race, class, and gender. His research is often applied in nature and is fueled by activism and a desire for social justice. Thematically and geographically, his research encompasses sound studies, folklore, anthropology, public humanities, Central America, Appalachia, Black American music, immigration, tourism, and timbre among others. His writing has been selected for presentation at SEM-SEC 2020 and the inaugural String Band Summit 2022. Christopher holds a BA with honors and a double concentration in Anthropology and Music and Culture from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He also composes and performs on the guitar, banjo, and electric bass.
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Wang Shuang
Shuang has been trained and worked as an ethnomusicologist, music archivist, and pipa player. Her recent research focuses on the perception and representation of 20th-century Chinese music via recordings. As a PhD student of Musicology and Ethnomusicology at Brown, she is also very excited to be able to explore other aspects of the music aesthetics-technology relationship. Her works have been presented at ARSC, Chapter meetings of SEM and AMS, and published through SEM Student News, Beijing Music Festival, and Yin Yue Tian Di (in Chinese). She holds an M.M. in Musicology from Johns Hopkins’ Peabody Institute and a B.A. from the China Conservatory of Music.
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Anna Wright
Before joining the PhD in Musicology and Ethnomusicology program at Brown, Anna studied at the University of British Columbia, where she earned a Master of Music in saxophone performance and a Master of Arts in ethnomusicology. Originally from Scotland, Anna focusses on Scottish traditional music and is particularly interested in ways music is utilized to encourage mass agency under political, nationalistic, or dissent-driven circumstances.
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Gabriel Zuckerberg
Gabriel is a strings- and keys-musician from New York, and he studied with Theodore Levin at Dartmouth College. Since 2018, Gabriel has been pursuing a preservation and music analysis project with the Romaniote communities in Greece and Manhattan and, since 2020, a preservation-analysis collaboration with Aniruddh Patel. A klezmer musician and aspiring Yiddishist, Gabriel is interested in musics of the Jewish diaspora. He’s now starting ethnographic work with LGBTQ+ klezmer and Yiddish musicians. At Brown, Gabriel is interested in exploring how aesthetics are tied to social identity, intersections of music and language, and musical hallucinations.