2023 Artist Scholarships
Awarded Artists:
Emmett Palaima
Emmett Palaima is an artist working with electronics and esoteric processes of sound creation. His work is conceptually rooted in the idea that technology and magic are one and the same, and that electricity is a manifestation of the divine or elemental forces underlying physical reality. He creates instruments which explore the experience of sound as an embodied, physical process and the sculptural beauty of the systems used in sound creation.
His practice approaches music history through a materialist lens: that the technological tools used to make music drive its stylistic development, and that by building new platforms for sonic experience, it is possible to advance the music-historical process. A key feature of this approach is collaboration, making the instruments he creates accessible to other performers thereby sharing and more fully exploring their sonic and creative potential. This approach centers on a long-term body of work building towards the creation of TEMPLE-65536: the world’s largest spatial audio instrument as a permanent installation open to artists and composers from around the world.
He has been an artist-in-residence at Harvestworks and a recipient of a NYSCA Support for Artists Grant. In 2024, he opened Chambers Hum, a public sound artwork developed in collaboration with the NYC MTA, active seven days a week on the Chambers St A/C subway platform. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Currents New Media Festival and Fusebox Festival. He has worked as a Sound Technologist for immersive installations with Meow Wolf Creative Studios and Dadalab, and contributed to projects for the Whitney Biennial, the Palm Springs Art Museum, and the CalArts MTIID Program. He has toured as a guitarist with Elizabeth Colour Wheel and played electronic ensemble sets at Moogfest and MASS MoCA. He has also worked professionally as a designer of guitar pedals and synthesizers. His practice is a consolidation of these diverse influences, combiningelements of functional and aesthetic design, sound, performance and architectural space. He lives in New York City.
Sara Stern
Sara Stern is an interdisciplinary artist from New York City. Her recent projects prod varied histories of landscape and urban development with speculative fiction. Stern has exhibited and screened her work in the US and internationally, at venues including SculptureCenter (Long Island City, NY), Anthology Film Archives (New York, NY), the Museum of the Moving Image (New York, NY), Ortega y Gasset Projects (Brooklyn, NY), Essex Flowers (New York, NY), and the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore (Singapore). Stern received a BA in Visual and Environmental Studies from Harvard College and an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University.
She is the recipient of a Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant, the Fountainhead Fellowship in Sculpture + Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University, and several residencies at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. In recent years, Stern has participated in the Fire Island Artist Residency (Cherry Grove, Fire Island, NY), the Artist Residency at the Carving Studio and Sculpture Center (West Rutland, VT), the Harvestworks New Works Residency (New York, NY), and The Watermill Center Artist Residency Program (Water Mill, NY). Stern is currently a participant in Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Arts Center Residency program on Governors Island.
Alice Shields
Alice Shields spins stories rich with the cultures of the world. Her operas and other music for voice, instruments and media morph together Western and non-Western forms of classical music and theater, such as the Noh Theater of Japan and the Bharata Natyam dance-drama of India. The result is Shields’ intense body of work: highly sculptured sound and singing with impassioned, complex movement and powerful drama.
Shields holds a doctorate in music composition from Columbia University, has taught psychology of music at NYU and has been Associate Director of the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center and Director of Development of the Columbia University Computer Music Center. One of the pioneers of electronic music, she is also unique as a composer in having become a professional opera singer, singing traditional and modern roles with the New York City Opera, Washington National Opera, the Clarion Music Society and other companies. Her expertise as a composer and librettist is highly informed by her training and onstage experience as a singer.
Her music has been performed by the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, Venice Biennale, New York City Opera’s Vox festival, New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, Columbia- Princeton Electronic Music Center, American Chamber Opera Company, Composers Chamber Theater, Santa Fe Opera Gallery Concerts, American Virtuosi Opera Theater, Lake George Opera Festival, Dance Alloy, Frostburg State University Dept. of Theater and Dance, James Madison University Dept. of Music and Dance, Arangham Dance Theater (India), Azure Ensemble, American Composers Alliance and the Association for the Promotion of New Music.
Shields has received grants and awards from Chamber Music America, Meet the Composer, NEA, NYFA, the National Opera Institute, Mary Flagler Cary Trust and other institutions. Her music is recorded on New World Records, CRI, American Composers Alliance, Albany Records, Koch International Classics, Opus One and Tellus. Her work is published by the American Composers Alliance.
Elico Suzuki
Elico Suzuki is an interdisciplinary sound artist based in Tokyo, Japan. She is also active as an improviser and composer under the name “suzueri”. She graduated from Musashino Art University and IAMAS in Japan, and is an adjunct lecturer at Musashino Art University Imaging Arts and Sciences, and the University of Tokyo. She is currently in New York as a fellow of the Asian Cultural Council 2022 NY.
She has presented her work nationally and internationally, including at Experimental Intermedia (US), ISSUE Project Room (US), Goethe Institute Boston (US), NTT InterCommunication Center (Japan), LUFF Festival (Switzerland), Audiograft Festival (England), Festival Tsonami (Chile), and others.