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Dispatch: Mary Prescott

Release Date: Thursday, June 25, 2020


In this Dispatch, Roulette TV talks with 2020 Roulette Resident composer Mary Prescott about creating during a time of uncertainty.

Mary Prescott is a Thai-American interdisciplinary artist, composer, and pianist who explores the foundations and facets of identity and social conditions through experiential performance. She aims to foster understanding and create pathways for change by voicing emotional and human truths through artistic investigation and dissemination.

Prescott’s output includes several large-scale music-theater works, improvised music, an immersive multimedia chamber opera, a 365-day sound journal, and a film score for Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance, as well as solo and chamber concert works. Prescott is a 2019-21 American Opera Projects Composers and the Voice Fellow, a 2019/20 Resident Artist at Roulette Intermedium (NYC), and a 2020 Lanesboro Arts Artist-in-Residence (MN). She has previously held residencies at Hudson Hall, Areté Venue and Gallery, Avaloch Farm Music Institute and Arts Letters and Numbers. In 2019, she was awarded a National Performance Network Creation and Development Grant, supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts; an Artist Initiative Grant and an Arts Tour Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. She has been commissioned by Roulette Intermedium (NYC, Jerome Foundation), Living Arts (Tulsa), Public Functionary (Minneapolis), Shepherdess Duo (Brooklyn Arts Council), Piano Teachers Congress of NY, and Duo Harmonia (MN State Arts Board). As Co-Founder and inaugural Artistic Director of the Lyra Music Festival at Smith College, Prescott was named a New York Foundation for the Arts Emerging Leader. She has served on faculty at the Goppisberger Music Festival in Switzerland, the Louisiana Chamber Music Institute, and is a Teaching Artist with American Composers Orchestra. Prescott holds degrees from the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities, and Manhattan School of Music.


As part of our Roulette at Home digital initiative, Dispatches is a set of brief communications or small collections of new work from artists, sent directly to our community—a way to remain connected and engaged in a time marked by distance, isolation, upheaval, and change.