UNSETTLEMENT SESSION

2026 RESIDENT ENSEMBLE

  • Composer/vocalist, residency director

    Latest album: Farming (Deathbomb Arc, 2025)
    Upcoming project: The Dispossessed (w/ Chana Porter, WildUp, Kaneza Schaal, Saul Williams)
    Bandcamp // Website

    Ted is a Grammy-nominated composer, singer, bandleader and recording artist. Inspired by the overlay of different viewpoints and their sonic possibilities, he creates personal and multi-dimensional works that often explore unconventional interactions of text and music.

    Hearne has collaborated with artists of many disciplines, including Saul Williams, Erykah Badu, Dorothea Lasky, Annie-B Parson, Pam Tanowitz, Damon Davis, Sanford Biggers, Rachel Perry, Ash K. Tata, Patricia McGregor and Daniel Fish. Recent works of note include over and over vorbei nicht vorbei (an opera commissioned by Komische Oper Berlin); Farming (a musical-theatrical work for The Crossing, envisioned as a conversation between Jeff Bezos and colonist William Penn); Elektra (a setting of Anne Carson’s translation of Sophocles for a play on London’s West End starring Brie Larson and Stockard Channing, directed by Daniel Fish); Place (a fiery meditation on gentrification and displacement, written with Saul Williams); Sound from the Bench (a vocal work setting the Supreme Court oral arguments to Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, with poet Jena Osman); and The Source (setting texts by U.S. Army Private Chelsea Manning and the U.S. Dept of Defense cables she was responsible for leaking to Julian Assange and Wikileaks).

    The New York Times has praised Ted for his "tough edge and wildness of spirit," and "topical, politically sharp-edged works." Pitchfork called Hearne's work "some of the most expressive socially engaged music in recent memory -- from any genre," and Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker that Hearne's music "holds up as a complex mirror image of an information- saturated, mass-surveillance world, and remains staggering in its impact.”

    Ted is a member of the composition faculty at University of Southern California. His work has been played by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, LA Philharmonic, and San Francisco Symphony, and conducted by Gustavo Dudamel and Michael Tilson Thomas. Ted performed his evening length songs project Dorothea at Carnegie Hall in October 2023. Other recent appearances include conducting at the New York City Ballet, a premiere at the Münchener Biennale, and newly commissioned works for the Royal Ballet of London and an operatic adaptation of Ursula K. Le Guin’s seminal science-fiction work The Dispossessed, with Kaneza Schaal and WildUp.

  • Composer/vocalist

    Latest album: Ki moun ou ye (New Amsterdam Records, 2024)
    Upcoming project: Le présent éternal (at MoMA)
    Bandcamp // Website

    Nathalie is a Grammy-nominated performer and composer. The Haitian-American artist is hailed for being “a fresh and invigorating cross-cultural voice”. (The Nation). Her creative practice centers an authentic commitment to storytelling and human connectivity while advocating for social change and cultural awareness, gaining her the reputation of being “powerful and unpretentious.” (The New York Times)

    Nathalie’s 2025-26 season includes several appearances at Opera Philadelphia as their Composer-in-Residence, including her contribution to the company’s world premiere opera Complications in Sue. She presents material from her upcoming opera Le présent éternel at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City in November 2025 and joins the New York Philharmonic for an expanded version of the work in May 2026 as the featured artist in the orchestra’s Sound On series. Joachim also appears at Carnegie Hall and The Juilliard School as an Arnhold Creative Associate, premieres her new multimedia work

    Solitude + S P A C E at Princeton Sound Kitchen and the Philadelphia Chamber Music Society, and joins DeCoda for performances of Fanm d’Ayiti in San Francisco and at Stanford University. Further world premieres this season include works written for London Sinfonietta/Holland Festival and the Jacksonville Symphony.

    Nathalie is Assistant Professor of Composition at Princeton University and is regularly commissioned to write for orchestra, instrumental and vocal ensembles, dance, and interdisciplinary theater. Her landmark project, Fanm d’Ayiti, an evening-length work for flute, voice, string quartet and electronics, celebrates and explores her personal Haitian heritage and received a GRAMMY nomination for Best World Music Album. Joachim’s sophomore album, Ki moun ou ye - an intimate examination of ancestral connection and self - was co-released by Nonesuch Records and New Amsterdam Records in 2024, and deemed “one of the year’s most creatively and personally ambitious albums.” (SPIN Magazine). Joachim is a recent Scholar-in-Residence at the Museum of Modern Art, and a United States Artist Fellow. She is an alumnus of The Juilliard School and The New School.

  • Composer/vocalist

    Latest album: BAKUNAWA (Deathbomb Arc)
    Bandcamp // Website

    Filipino-American composer and sound artist Micaela Tobin wields her soprano voice against the confines of convention, specializing in experimental and contemporary realms of opera and noise. Integrating voice with electronics, ritualized gesture and amplified object-symbolism, she weaves dynamic music that is at once alluring and demanding.

    With her primary project, White Boy Scream, Micaela dissects her operatic and extended vocal techniques through hardware, oscillating between extreme textures of noise, drone, and choral sound-walls. Her most recent full length album, BAKUNAWA (Deathbomb Arc), includes elements of sonic ritual, ancient myth, and ancestral memory. Of the album, The New Yorker asserts, “Opera would do well to pay attention.” The album was ranked #9 Release of 2020 in The Wire. Her upcoming album, APOLAKI, continues this thread, already declared by Passion of the Weiss as “a brilliant showcase in the evolution of her art [that] pushes her alchemized sound to its absolute limits.”

    As a composer and director, Micaela presented her cinematic debut at REDCAT in May 2021, titled “BAKUNAWA: Opera of the Seven Moons,” as an adaptation of the synonymous album. Continuing her series incorporating the precolonial mythology of the Philippines, Micaela premiered her second opera in July 2023, “APOLAKI: Opera of the Scorched Earth,” at the historic Zorthian Ranch. She performed as the principal role of Coyote in the critically acclaimed opera, “SWEET LAND” (dir. Yuval Sharon & Canuppa Luger; Comp. Raven Chacon & Du Yun.) Her talents were also displayed in The Industry’s groundbreaking piece, “Hopscotch Opera, A Mobile Opera for 24 Cars (dir. Yuval Sharon)”; as principal vocalist in the premiere of Ron Athey and Sean Griffith’s automatic opera, “Gifts the Spirit”; and as a soprano soloist alongside Annette Bening in the play “Medea” at UCLALive.

    Micaela is the proud recipient of the 2021 MAP Fund, the 2022 NPN Creation & Development Fund, and was most recently awarded the 2024 Civitella Ranieri Fellowship. She is currently based in Tulsa, OK as an awardee of the 2025-2027 Tulsa Artist Fellowship.

    Beyond her own creative output, Micaela has fostered young and new talent as a voice teacher on faculty at the California Institute for the Arts and through her experimental voice hub, HOWL SPACE."

  • Bass player / Arranger / Producer / Music Director

    Solomon’s creative curiosity has led to collaborations with jazz luminaries such as Jose James, Teri Lynn Carrington and Lakecia Benjamin and songwriters including Brandi Carlile, Amos Lee, KT Tunstall and Kesha. Solomon recently performed with dynamic indie pop/folk band Lucius in support of their new album “Second Nature.” He currently tours as music director for the live show of Brandi Carlile.

    Solomon has also enjoyed creating orchestral arrangements for and performing with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Vienna Staatsoper, Indianapolis Symphony, LA Philharmonic and Seattle Symphony Orchestra. An avid supporter of education and diplomacy, he has participated as a clinician and educator with Carnegie Hall's Cultural Exchange program and was also named a Cultural Ambassador by the US Department of State presenting concerts and masterclasses in Greece, Kosovo, Turkey, Mexico, Macedonia, Russia and India.

  • Composer/vocalist

    Latest album: The Vanishing Point (Ba Da Bing, 2024)
    Featured video: Immature
    Bandcamp // Website

    Eliza is known for her “ethereal” aesthetic (New York Times), “luminous sound” (New York Times) and “gossamer” singing (New Yorker), along with a unique performance and improvisational practice. She has performed as a soloist around the globe, with a wide-ranging career that includes chamber music at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, motets by John Zorn at Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, Meredith Monk’s Atlas with the LA Philharmonic, and premieres by Ted Hearne at Carnegie Hall and Chaya Czernowin at Walt Disney Concert Hall. She has sung lead roles in new operas with the Komische Oper Berlin, Philadelphia Opera, The Industry, and the Prototype Festival, and is a member of GRAMMY-winning vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth.

    Bagg is a frequent guest soloist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and has sung as a soloist with the New York Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, Boston Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, and North Carolina Symphony. She has collaborated closely with musicians and ensembles such as Nico Muhly, Pekka Kuusisto, Attacca String Quartet, Claire Chase, Bang on a Can All-Stars, Lorelei Ensemble, Nadia Sirota, Sofia Jernberg, Wild Up, and A Far Cry, among many others. Frequently developing and performing new work by composers like Ted Hearne, Ellen Reid, Angelica Négron, Caroline Shaw, Gabriel Kahane, and John Zorn, Bagg is a renowned collaborator and creative contributor.

    Bagg’s compositional work integrates mainstream, contemporary aesthetics with classical languages, historical forms, and an avant-garde sensibility, often using pop production and electronic processing to explore the “valley between authenticity and artifice” (The Guardian). Dubbed an “electro-pop alien” by NPR, Bagg tours globally under the artist name Lisel and has released three solo albums, including the "chrome-tinted harmonies...[and] intricate latticeworks" (Bandcamp Daily) of her critically acclaimed piece Patterns For Auto-Tuned Voices And Delay. She has been in residence as a composer at Yaddo and Avaloch Farm, and has created new opera-theatre performances for REDCAT's New Original Works Festival and Wild Up’s Endless Season. She has performed her innovative work for processed voice at institutions such as Lincoln Center, Big Ears Festival, Birds of Paradise Festival, Musica Festival Strasbourg, De Doelen, Public Records, and the Bemis Center, among others.

  • Guitarist / improviser / band leader

    Taylor is a New York based guitarist and circuit designer working across the experimental, improvised and composed music communities. He’s made music and recorded with a diverse range of artists such as John Zorn, Lee Ronaldo, Yuka Honda, Steve Reich, Yo La Tengo, Marc Ribot, Nels Cline, Meredith Monk, Erykah Badu, Ted Hearne, Steve Miller, and ensembles including Komische Oper Berlin, Kronos Quartet, London Sinfonietta, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Ensemble Signal, and Alarm Will Sound.

    Taylor has been invited to perform at festivals and venues such as Carnegie Hall in New York, Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, Big Ears Festival in Knoxville, Vértice Festival in Mexico City, Royal Albert Hall and Sound Unbound Festival at Barbican Centre in London, Casa da Musica in Porto, Jazz em Agosto in Lisbon, Musica Festival at Le Maillon in Strasbourg, Sacrum Profanum in Kraków, Borealis Festival in Bergen, Norway, The Fringe Club in Hong Kong, City Recital Hall in Sydney, and Melbourne Recital Hall in Melbourne.

    Taylor founded and co-directs the electric guitar quartet, Dither, whose music making has been described by the New York Times as “sophisticated, hard-driving, and stylistically omnivorous.” In addition to touring, composing, producing and commissioning original work, Dither has held visiting artist residencies at Columbia, Cornell, Princeton, and NYU.

  • Drummer / Arranger / Improviser

    Ron is a Grammy-nominated drummer and percussionist based in Charleston, SC. He performs regularly in the Southeast with ensembles whose styles range from jazz and salsa to free improvisation to avant-garde and contemporary classical music.

    Ron is a seasoned and devoted collaborator, driven by the challenge of integrating live percussion to any musical scenario. He treats the drums as an essential yet accompanimental instrument in all manner of band and chamber settings, and is an enthusiastic musical partner in bringing ideas to life.

    Ron has recently performed at BAM, Kennedy Center, The Stone NYC, Alice Tully Hall, Le Poisson Rouge, National Sawdust, The Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Constellation (Chicago), Taube Atrium Theater (SF), and Walt Disney Concert Hall in LA. When not on tour, Ron is often seen performing at jazz and improvised venues around Charleston.

    He co-leads multiple jazz/improvized music groups and is the leader and originator of the band Rad Western. Wiltrout has performed with The Charleston Jazz Orchestra, Barrel Proof, Garage Cuban Band, Harry Allen, Lee Barbour, Ken Thomson Sextet, Tommy Gill, Asphalt Orchestra, The Crossing Choir, Gino Castillo and the Cuban Cowboys, Duda Lucena, Conor Donohue, Lindsay Holler, Matadero, Katrina Ballads, Your Bad Self, and the Opposite of a Train. 

    He has performed at The Jazz Corner, The Mezz, Charleston Music Hall, The Gaillard Center, He performs regularly at Charleston, SC venues such as Forte Jazz Lounge, Bar Mash, the Music Farm, the Pourhouse, and more.

    As an improvising musician he has recorded with

    As a performer of new music, he has premiered pieces by Ted Hearne, Michael Pisaro-Liu, Sam Sfirri, KCM Walker, Andy Akiho, Sean Friar, Philip White, and Nathan Koci. He has recorded pieces by Sam Sfirri (released on Wandelweiser und so weiter 2012), and Michael Pisaro-Liu (Tombstones: Live in Brooklyn Editions Verde 2022). His work with Ted Hearne has resulted in multiple recordings including Katrina Ballads (New Amsterdam Records 2010), Sound From The Bench (Cantaloupe Music 2017), and the cello/percussion duet "Furtive Movements" from the album Hazy Heart Pump (New Focus Recordings 2019) and earned him a Grammy Nomination (for Place released 2020: Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance).

    Ron’s work is featured on albums of Robert Lewis, Lee Barbour, Jeremy Wolf,  The Opposite of a Train, Shimmy Ghøster, Conor Donohue, Let Love, Lindsay Holler, Matadero, Bill Carson, Joel Hamilton, and with Slow Runner and Michael Flynn. He has recorded and premiered multiple works of Ted Hearne.

  • Composer / Electronics / Performing musician

    Latest album: Prey
    Bandcamp // Website

    Rohan (a.k.a BAKUDI SCREAM) is a media artist and electronic musician based in the United States. Described as “hypersensory” (Washington Post), “remarkably alive” (The Wire Magazine), and of “transcendent metamorphosis” (I Care If You Listen), Chander’s work considers questions of postcoloniality in the diaspora through hindoo historical research and speculative fiction. Donning a full-body suit and mask– metallic and electronically wired– BAKUDI SCREAM creates electronic music pulling from hardcore and South Asian music within performance rituals that blend hyperactive lighting, cyberpunk allegory, and experimental DJing. He was named by the Washington Post in their roundup "22 for 22: Composers and Performers to Watch this year."

    Rohan work has been commissioned by organizations such as the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Matt Marks Impact Fund. His composed works have been performed by Yarn/Wire, International Contemporary Ensemble, Alarm Will Sound, Chromic Duo, So Percussion, Vicky Chow, and others. As BAKUDI SCREAM, Rohan won the 2022 Gaudeamus Prize for Music Composition for his debut solo album, FINAL SKIN and has performed at places such as Donaueschinger Musiktage, Klang Roma, Tivoli Vredenburg, KM28, the SPAM New Media Festival, and others. He has received fellowships from the Folger Shakespeare Library, the California Council for the Arts, and support from Mid Atlantic Arts, REDCAT NOW, The Foundation for Contemporary Art, the Ernst von Siemens Foundation, the Netherlands-American Foundation, and others.

    Rohan is active as an electronic and keyboard artist, and has performed notably on several works by GRAMMY and Pulitzer nominated composer Ted Hearne, including ‘over and over vorbei nicht vorbei’ with Komische Oper Berlin, ‘Place’ at the LA Phil and CAL Performances, ‘The Source’ at Festival Musica Strasbourg, and ’Dorothea’ at Carnegie Hall. Rohan also performed and produced in Hearne's digi-core oratorio 'Farming,' out on Deathbomb Arc.

  • Librettist / author / theatre artist

    Featured work: The Seep
    Upcoming project: The Dispossessed (w/ Wild Up, Saul Williams, Kaneza Schaal, Ted Hearne)
    Website

    Chana is a novelist, playwright, teacher, MacDowell fellow, and cofounder of The Octavia Project, a STEM and writing program for girls and trans and nonbinary youth that uses speculative fiction to envision greater possibilities for our world. 

    Chana’s widely acclaimed debut novel The Seep was an ABA Indie Next Pick and Open Letters Best Science Fiction & Fantasy Book of 2020, with translations published in Turkish and Spanish. She is a 2021 and 2024 Lambda Literary Award finalist. Her second novel The Thick and The Lean was an Amazon Editor’s Pick and named The Times of London Best Sci-Fi Book of 2023.

    As a playwright, her work has been developed and performed with Playwrights Horizons, New Georges, 3LD, La MaMa, amongst others. She is currently writing the libretto for a new opera based on Le Guin’s The Dispossessed with Ted Hearne for the Los Angeles based ensemble WildUp. As an educator, Chana has taught courses in playwriting and fiction at University of Houston, Fordham University, Sarah Lawrence, and many more institutions. She lives in Los Angeles. 

  • Visual artist / “engagement dramaturg” / educator

    Nia is a visual artist whose artistic and research practices center community engagement and local histories of marginalized populations. 

    Nia’s other art works range from historically positioned print books like THE LAST GREEN BOOK (2022), which retells the Chicago-based South Side sites listed in the 1962 edition of the famed African American travel guide ‘The Negro Motorist Green Book’ through careful photo documentation, observation and extensive research; to interventional time-based projects like IT’S JUST OK (2019), a response to neighborhood alienation installed as a billboard in Avondale, Chicago and paired with guided neighborhood tours. Also an art educator, Nia has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago since 2020.