Miya Masaoka works at the intersections of sound, composition, improvisation, spatialized perception and social interaction. Her work encompasses instrument building, creating computing wear-ables. She has a body of work mapping and sonifying the data behavior of plants, brain activity and insect movement for almost twenty years. Her work has exhibited internationally including the Venice Biennale, Park Avenue Armory, Merkin Hall, ICA, PA, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and many others. She was a Fulbirght fellow to Japan in 2016, and has been awarded the Doris Duke Award, the Alpert Award, Gerbode, the MAP Fund, Montalvo Residency and The Centre for Contemporary Art at Ujazdowski Castle. She has taught composition at NYU and in the Sound program at Bard MFA since 2002, and is currently the director for the MFA Sound Art program at Columbia University. Her installation “Vaginated Ears” travels to Bonn, Germany to the KunzMuzeum in 2017. She will premiere a piece for the Glasgow Orchestra in 2018. The Wire publication calls her work, “virtuosic, magnificient…essential.”
Brooke O’Harra is co-founder (with composer Brendan Connelly) of The Theater of a Two-headed Calf which was initiated in 2000. O’Harra has developed and directed all 14 of Two-headed Calf’s productions including the OBIE Award winning Drum of the Waves of Horikawa (2007 HERE Arts Center), It Cannot Be Called Our Mother but Our Graves a.k.a Macbeth (Soho Rep Lab 2008/9), Trifles (Ontological Hysteric Incubator 2010), and the opera project You, My Mother (2012 at La Mama ETC, 2013 in the River to River Festival). Brooke conceived, directed, wrote for, and performed in the Dyke Division of Two-headed Calf’s live lesbian soap opera Room For Cream which ran for three full seasons (25 episodes) at La Mama, ETC in NYC between 2008-10. Brooke’s work has been supported by numerous awards, grants and residencies including several NYSCA grants, a Franklin Furnace performing artists award, an Arts Matters grant, the NEA/TCG Directors program, an OBIE award grant, a residency at The Performing Garage, and an LMCC space grant.
Born and raised in Japan, Eiko Otake is a New York-based movement artist, performer, and choreographer who for more than 40 years worked as Eiko & Koma. Since 2014, she has directed and performed a solo project, A Body in Places, in which she collaborates with photographer and historian William Johnston to create and present a series of exhibitions showing her dancing in irradiated Fukushima and elsewhere. She teaches an interdisciplinary course about the Atomic Bombings and Nuclear disasters at Wesleyan University and Colorado College.