Judy Dunaway, an interdisciplinary artist, proposes to document and innovate her work with latex balloons as experimental sound conduits and sculptural instruments. This project will involve recording improvisations, pressing LPs, and creating more durable sculptures as she adapts to the discontinuation of Qualatex balloons. (Portrait photo courtesy of the artist)
2025 Sponsored Projects
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.
Associated project: ShiftDriver-32
We’re excited to share that Emmett Palaima has received a Support for Artists Grant from the New York State Council on the Arts to advance the ShiftDriver Spatial Audio System, an instrument designed to control large-scale spatial sound using 1-bit audio. This project continues to evolve, building toward Temple-65536, envisioned as the world’s largest spatial audio instrument. We’re proud to have supported Emmett through our New Works Residency Program and look forward to seeing this work develop.
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.
Associated project: A Festival of Lights in the Court of Love
A Festival of Lights tells the story of one such Orphic activist who is struggling to apply the Orphic instructions and become immortal. The opera is written for three singers, chorus, actors, live and electronic music, dance, and video projections. Indian music is incorporated, echoing what these nonviolent activists may have chanted during their peaceful sunset ceremonies. The libretto draws from fragments of ancient Greek Orphic poems and the modern poetry of Edward Barrett.
AutomaticRelease
Shaun Irons and Lauren Petty (AutomaticRelease) are multiplatform artists who make interdisciplinary performances, installations, experimental films, documentaries and interactive video scores to accompany live performance. Recent projects include Why Why Always, a live cine-performance inspired by Jean-Luc Godard’s techno-noir film Alphaville (Abrons, 2017), Atmospheres & Accidental Ghosts, a self-generating video/sound installation (NYEAF, 2015), and Keep Your Electric Eye On Me, an interdisciplinary performance exploring dual realities and hysteria (HERE, 2014). Their current project All Over Everywhere, a requiem for an imperiled natural world, received production funds from both NYSCA and NYFA Made in NY Women’s Fund, was featured in The Kitchen’s online magazine All Over Everywhere premiered in May2021 as a live-broadcast on Twitch as part of Theater Mitu’s Artists-At-Home series.
Their work has been presented at venues including BAM, The Brooklyn Museum, The Chocolate Factory, Anthology Film Archives, The Kitchen, Tokyo Wonder Site, REDCAT, CURRENTS New Media Festival, Rencontres International Paris/Berlin, the Museo Nacional Havana and the Venice Biennale. They have received numerous awards including grants from the NEA, NYSCA, NYFA, Jerome Foundation, Greenwall Foundation, Bel Geddes Fund, Mertz Gilmore Foundation, LMCC, Harvestworks, Asian Cultural Council, as well as residencies from Yaddo, MacDowell, Signal Culture, HERE, Camargo Foundation, the Tokyo Wonder Site and the Bogliasco Foundation.
Associated project: All That is Seen and Unseen
All That Is Seen and Unseen is an interdisciplinary installation opera which investigates the multifarious effects of technology on our collective human consciousness. The work confronts the dangerous erosion of truth and trust in our society, which is rapidly intensifying due to advancing A.I., computational propaganda, deepfakes, and other tools that manipulate and obscure reality. Through video, music, custom programming, and performance, the artists explore machine learning by creating a performative neural network in real time, imagining a quasi-supernatural invasion of malfunctioning and overreaching intelligent machines, where nothing is as it appears and no one is safe.
Katherine Bennett (LadyK)
As a new media, fiber, and installation artist, LadyK’s practice encompasses interactive and responsive systems exploring how our collective digital experiences are shaping our future. She merges ancient fiber traditions with programming and physical computing to create nervous systems for her handcrafted soft fiber structures. Liminal spaces brought forth by digital technologies fascinate her, as LadyK explores the cultural transformations that result. Her latest environments investigate how communication technologies are shaping our identity, pushing a tighter integration with the machine.
Associated project: The Masquerades of the Soft Machines: Data Devourers
Katherine Bennett has received a Support for Artists Grant from the New York State Council on the Arts to develop The Masquerades of the Soft Machines: Data Devourers, a fiber and electronic installation that makes visible the hidden algorithmic forces shaping our world. Set within a soft, colorful, forest-like environment, the piece invites viewers to witness their data being recycled and fed into artificial intelligence models, revealing the intricate and often unseen relationship between human interaction and machine learning. We’re proud to support Katherine through our New Works Residency Program and look forward to seeing this immersive work come to life.
Judy Dunaway
For over twenty years Judy Dunaway has primarily been known for her numerous works for latex balloons as sound producers, including free improvisations, electronic and multi-media works, sound installations, and compositions. She has presented these works throughout North America and Europe at many important venues, festivals, museums and galleries including the Academy of Media Arts Cologne (Germany), Alternative Museum (NYC), Audio Art Festival 2016 (Krakow), Cafe Oto (London), Bang on a Can Festival (NYC), Diapason (NYC), Everson Art Museum (Syracuse), Frau Musica Nova (Germany), Galerie Rachel Haferkamp (Cologne), the Guelph Jazz Festival (Canada), Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors (NYC), the New Museum of Contemporary Art (NYC), Ohrenhoch sound gallery (Berlin), Performance Space 122 (NYC), Podewil (Berlin), Roulette (NYC), the Roy and Edna Disney Center (Los Angeles), Seltsame Musik Festival (Austria), STEIM (Netherlands) and ZKM (Germany). Her discography includes CDs on the Composers Recordings, Inc. (CRI) and Innova labels, among others.