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Tag: Van Lier Fellows

Announcing Roulette’s 2021 Van Lier Fellows

Roulette is excited to announce the selection of vocalist Charmaine Lee and violinist/violist and interdisciplinary performing artist Eddy Kwon as 2021 Van Lier Fellows. They will join Roulette’s Resident and Commissioned artists in presenting new work at Roulette in 2021.

Our long-time partnership with the Edward and Sally Van Lier Fund of the New York Community Trust has enabled Roulette to offer year-long fellowships to a number of outstanding young artists to create, rehearse, experiment, and investigate new directions in their craft.

Eddy Kwon (they/them) is a violinist/violist, vocalist, composer, improviser, and interdisciplinary performing artist based in Brooklyn. They are a United States Artists Ford Fellow, Hermitage Fellow, and Johnson Fellow for Artists Transforming Communities (Americans For The Arts). In addition to a rigorous and evolving solo practice, they collaborate with artists of diverse disciplines, including The Art Ensemble of Chicago, Senga Nengudi, Tomeka Reid, Degenerate Art Ensemble, Jens Lekman, and Lizzy DuQuette. They have performed throughout the Americas and Europe, including the Kennedy Center, Big Ears Festival, SESC Pompeia, Barbican Centre, Berlin Jazz Festival, Festival Banlieues Bleues, and more. Recent commissions include the Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati, National Performance Network, and Colorado College Creativity & Innovation. www.eddykwon.net

Charmaine Lee is a New York-based vocalist from Sydney, Australia. Her music is predominantly improvised, favoring a uniquely personal approach to vocal expression concerned with spontaneity, playfulness, and risk-taking. Charmaine uses amplification, feedback, and microphones to augment and distort the voice. She has performed with leading improvisers Nate Wooley, id m theft able, C. Spencer Yeh, and Ikue Mori, and maintains ongoing collaborations with Conrad Tao, Victoria Shen, Zach Rowden, and Eric Wubbels. She has performed at ISSUE Project Room, the Kitchen, Roulette, the Stone, and MoMA PS1, and participated in festivals including Resonant Bodies, Huddersfield Contemporary, and Ende Tymes. She has been featured in group exhibitions including The Moon Represents My Heart: Music, Memory and Belonging at the Museum of Chinese in America (2019). As a composer, Charmaine has been commissioned by the Wet Ink Ensemble (2018) and Spektral Quartet (2018). In 2019, she was an Artist-in-Residence at ISSUE Project Room. Charmaine is currently a member of the Editorial Board of Sound American. www.charmainelee.com

Our 2020 Van Lier Fellows

Roulette is proud to present our 2020 Van Lier Fellows: composer and audio technologist Anastasia Clarke and composer, musician, and multidisciplinary artist Anjna Swaminathan.

A longtime partnership with the Edward and Sally Van Lier Fund of the New York Community Trust has enabled Roulette to offer year-long fellowships to a number of outstanding young artists to create, rehearse, experiment, and investigate new directions in their craft. Past Roulette Van Lier Fellows include Matthew Welch, Matana Roberts, Tyshawn Sorey, Ha Yang Kim, Paula Matthusen, Darius Jones, Maria Chavez, Mary Halvorson, Brandon Lopez, and Kelly Moran.

Anastasia Clarke is a New York-based composer, performer, and audio technologist working in live embodied electronic music performance. Her sprawling custom instrument-interfaces and deliberately confusing sound performing systems make theatre out of human-instrument interaction; therapy out of earnest sound exploration; and jokes out of the impossibility of ever understanding exactly what is going on. In addition to custom electronics, monologues, movement, and the destruction and repurposing of sound-generating materials figure heavily into Anastasia’s whimsical sonic textures, guiding performers and audiences into complex plays of attention without any hand-holding.

Clarke’s work is performed in galleries, concert halls, DIY venues and unsuspecting community spaces across the United States. Clarke has also engaged audiences through speaking and pedagogy, most recently at Cycling ’74’s Expo ’74, NIME 2018, The School for Poetic Computation, and various colleges and universities.  Clarke earned an MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media from Mills College in 2018, and has received support for subsequent work and research from the Queens Arts Fund, EMS (Stockholm), CCRMA, and a 2020 Van Lier Fellowship at Roulette.

Anjna Swaminathan is a queer multidisciplinary artist, composer, violinist, vocalist, writer, theatre artist, educator, and dramaturg. As an artist with a passion for sociopolitical work, community building, and critical consciousness, Swaminathan’s artistic practice is an extension of her activist spirit. Informed by her rigorous training in the Carnatic and Hindustani music traditions of India, Anjna creates in New York’s vibrant creative music and improvisatory scene, in hybrid classical compositional work, and in her own multidisciplinary projects. Since 2018, Anjna has been under the compositional mentorship of Gabriela Lena Frank and continues her training in Hindustani music with Samarth Nagarkar. Swaminathan holds a BA in Theatre from the University of Maryland, College Park.