Miller Endowment Visitors Archive

Ilya Demutsky is an award-winning composer, performer and conductor. His works include compositions for orchestra, choir, chamber ensemble, piano, voice, as well as electronic and film music. His commissions/productions extend to Chicago, San Francisco, Sidney, Paris, TelAviv and beyond. Ilya currently resides in France, to distance himself from Putin's regime and remain connected to international collaborators and institutions. He is the author of 4 full length ballets: A Hero of Our Time, Optimistic Tragedy, Nureyev and Anna Karenina.

Demutsky’s music for the full-length ballet A Hero of Our Time at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow won him Russia's most coveted theatrical award, the Golden Mask, for Best Composer in Musical Theatre, and the production was named Best Ballet Production of 2015/2016. In January 2017, San Francisco Ballet opened its new season with the world premiere of his ballet Optimistic Tragedy, and the same year ended with the highly anticipated opening of the full-length ballet Nureyev at the Bolshoi in December 2017. Nureyev won four Prix Benois 2018 awards, including best composer's work in ballet.

In 2019, the Joffrey Ballet and The Australian Ballet commissioned a new full-length orchestral score from Ilya Demutsky for an entirely new "story ballet" based on Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, the first full-length commission in the Joffrey's history. It is touring U.S. again this year, with performances in Chicago, Washington, D.C. and San Francisco to sold out houses. For his score to Kirill Serebrennikov's film The Student, Demutsky was named European Composer of 2016 by the European Film Academy. The full-length ballet The Seagull, commissioned by the Bolshoi Theatre (premiered in July 2021), recently won the Golden Mask and BraVo Awards for Best Ballet.

Among Demutsky’s recent works is music for the world opening of the full-length oratorio project The Last Day of an Eternal City, a choral polyphonic experiment combining Latin, Italian, and Russian texts. One of Putin’s most powerful opponents served as fodder for the character of a political prisoner in a story set during the Roman Empire--a satirically allusive piece both entertaining and politically charged. Commissioned by the Moscow State Chamber Choir, the production opened against pandemic uncertainties to a sold-out audience on November 11, 2021, in Moscow’s largest and newest concert hall, Zaryad’e.

Demutsky composed the music for the world opening of the play The Patriarchs and the Matriarchs, the only play written by the revered Israeli writer Meir Shalev, opened at Gesher Theatre in Tel Aviv in June 2023, directed by Amit Epstein. Demutsky has a long successful history of collaboration with UIUC, where his work was workshopped and premiered in 2017 and 2023, in collaboration with LyricTheatre @ Illinois and Theatre students.

WEBSITE

Information about the residency (including public events) HERE

Suman Mukhopadhyay is a prominent director of theater and cinema, a writer of plays and stories, and a performer based in Kolkata, India. Since 2005, he has directed 9 feature films, of which Chaturanga (4 Parts, 2009) and Herbert (2008) have been recipients of multiple national and international awards. His films have been screened throughout Europe, Asia, and North America; his most recent film Nazarband (Captive, 2020) premiered at Busan International Film Festival. Prior to his filmmaking career, Mukhopadhyay has been a leading figure in in the Bengali stage scene. A recipient of the highest state and national awards from the Indian Drama Academy and West Bengal Theatre Academy, he has directed and performed in adaptations of Chekov, Brecht, and Max Frisch, Klaus Mann’s texts, in addition to plays based on Bengali and Hindi texts. He has been an engaged scholar and teacher of theater as well, and has taught and workshopped in various American universities, including University of California (Berkeley) and University of Toledo in Ohio.

Mukhopadhyay’s stage career began in 1990 with his direction of and performance in Janani (Mother) and an adaptation of Chekov’s “A Clerk’s Death.” His sheer spread of plays represent the work of an awe-inspiring range of authors: from Sudraka (classical Sanskrit dramatist) to Shakespeare, from Rabindranath Tagore to Ibsen and Chekov, and from Debesh Roy to Max Frisch, the list is too long to enumerate. In between directing and performing in plays in Kolkata/Calcutta and Delhi, he has trained and collaborated with actors and directors in Germany, Italy, and the US. In 2006, he directed “Man of the Heart” as an off-off-Broadway show at Kraine Theater. In the year of his debut as a filmmaker, he was the artist in residence at University of California, Berkeley, as a theater director, which shows his versatility and commitment to both art forms. His most recent engagement with both art forms was in 2022, as a Fulbright-Nehru scholar at Columbia University, awarded for academic and professional excellence.

Suman Mukhopadhyay has carved a space for himself in the crowded field of Indian filmmaking (India is the top film producing nation with an annual output of over 2,000 films) with his thoughtful choice of content and his near-flawless execution. For his first film in 2005, Suman Mukhopadhyay chose to adapt Herbert, a novel by Nabarun Bhattacharya, whose writings have only recently been inducted into the postcolonial literary canon. Mukhopadhyay returned to Bhattacharya’s writings for his 3rd and 4th film as well, which shows his sincere dedication to bold content. He has directed two films based on two of Tagore’s popular novels, Chaturanga (2008) and Shesher Kabita (The Concluding Poem, 2012), which had been considered among the most unfilmable. Chaturanga received the Grand Prix at the Sarajevo film festival, and prizes at Vancouver, Philadelphia, and New Jersey Asian film festival as well. Apart from his directorial career in cinema and the theater, Suman Mukhopadhyay has been an active and influential figure in the Indian cultural sphere. He has served in the Academic Council of the National School of Drama (New Delhi), as a member of the Expert Committee of Performing Arts at Government of India’s Ministry of Culture, a Board of Trustee Member of the Kolkata Museum of Modern Art. He was India’s cultural representative to Prague Quadrennial in 2003. He is a frequent contributor to literary and cultural columns in prominent Bengali newspapers.

CNRS Researcher and Head of the Géochimie des Enveloppes Externes Team, Institute de Physique du Globe de Paris

Biography

https://patriziapolese.com/

https://www.mikiorihara.com/

Miki Orihara is best known for her work as a principal dancer in the Martha Graham Dance Company, which she joined in 1987 and earned a New York Dance & Performance (Bessie) Award for Sustained Achievement in 2010. She has performed on Broadway and with Elisa Monte, Martha Clarke, SITI Company, PierGroupDance, Lotuslotus. Her solo concert series, Resonance has been enthusiastically received by audiences and critics around the world. Resonance traces the lineage of some of today’s most imaginative dance makers through earlier innovators like Martha Clarke and Lar Luvobitch and back to the masterworks of Martha Graham and José Limón. In Resonance II, Orihara premiered Shirabyoshi, a Japanese dancer, as part of a CUNY Dance Initiative 2016-17 residency at LaGuardia Performing Arts Center (LPAC). She premiered Resonance III in May 2019 at LPAC, focusing on works of American and Japanese modern dance pioneers. This production received Japan Foundation’s Tour Grant 2018/2019.

In 2019, in addition to her own concert series, she started to work in Berlin with DanceOn Project. Orihara has presented her choreography in New York, Amsterdam and Tokyo/Nagoya. She is a sought after teacher and coach, working with the Kirov Ballet, Nakamura/Shuto Project (Japan), Japan’s New National Theater Ballet School, The Ailey School, New York University, The Hartt School, L’été de la Danse (Paris), Henny Jurien Studio (Amsterdam) and is Dance Director for Mishmash＊Miki Orihara. Orihara was featured in the Inaugural performance of “Peace is...” at the United Nations as a part of the Permanent Mission of Japan in April 2017. Orihara is the Dance Director for Martha Graham Dance Technique Level 1 DVD, documenting Graham technique with Dance Spotlight and Martha Graham Centre.

MillerComm information here

Tianhui Ng is the Music Director of the Pioneer Valley Symphony, Boston Opera Collaborative, the Victory Players, and White Snake Projects. He has conducted orchestras around the world, including the Savaria Symphony Orchestra (Hungary), Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra (Czech Republic), Dartington Festival Orchestra (UK), Orchestra of the Royal Opera of Wallonie (Belgium), and the Oregon Bach Festival Orchestra (USA). A versatile musician, he is equally at home in choral music. He has conducted ensembles like the Stuttgart Chamber Choir (Germany), Carnegie Hall Festival Chorus (USA), Oregon Bach Festival Chorus (USA), Yale Schola Cantorum (USA), and the Young Person’s Chorus of New York (USA). He has collaborated with internationally renowned artists such as Dashon Burton, Tyler Duncan, Marcus Eiche, Jamie-Rose Guarrine, Ayano Kataoka, Ilya Polataev, Gary Steigerwalt, Astrid Schween, Sara Davis Buechner, Hanna Elisabeth Müller, Nicholas Phan, James Taylor, Gilles Vonsattel, and Soyoung Yoon.

Well known for bringing new music to fresh audiences, he has premiered new works by numerous composers, including Pulitzer and Rome Prize winners such as Aaron Jay Kernis, Robert Kyr, David Sanford, and Joan Tower. These include unusual firsts, like Irin Ajo, the first Nigerian opera by Olabode Omojola, and Chaya Czernowin’s ephemeral Once I Blinked, Nothing was the Same.

Tian’s irrepressible musical spirit first expressed itself when he conducted a choir of kindergarten children in his native Singapore at the age of five. A pianist, singer, and trombonist, he later studied composition and early music at the University of Birmingham (UK), where he discovered his love for Stravinsky and contemporary music. Returning home, he helped found one of the first contemporary music ensembles in the country and was soon composing for animation, dance, film, chorus, and orchestra. During this time, he discovered his affinity for interdisciplinary work. He created the groundbreaking site-specific community-based arts festival, NOMAD, with which he has won awards from the Singapore National Arts Council. His works have since been heard in diverse settings such as the Hong Kong Film Festival, Animation World Magazine (USA), and Apsara Asia Dance (Singapore). Ng Tian Hui continued his education at the Yale School of Music (USA), where he helped start a new tradition with the music of his graduation recital reflecting on war and conflict. There, he fed his passion for the masterworks of the choral-orchestral repertoire, assisting such renowned interpreters as Nicholas McGegan, Masaaki Suzuki, Dale Warland, Simon Carrington, Marguerite Brooks, and Jeffrey Douma. He is indebted to his teachers, including Paolo Arrivabeni, John Carewe, Peter Eötvös, Kurt Masur, and Michel Tabachnik, who have incalculably enriched his musical life.

In 2022-2023, Tian looks forward to a season that builds on the excitement of the previous season with an invitation to lead White Snake Projects performing Mary Prescott’s Survivor’s Odyssey at the Opera America National Conference, a debut at WGBH for a festival of new music from Puerto Rico and, the premiere of Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate’s Shell Shaker, the world’s first opera in Shell Shaker.

Link to the MillerComm event here

Andrei Kureichik is a prize-winning playwright, screenwriter, director and publicist from Minsk, Belarus, currently living in exile. Read more.

CAS/MillerComm2022 event here

At the height of his compositional career, John Harbison has recently published a series of essays on Bach, whose music he has worked with as a conductor in Boston for many years. During his residency here he will be able to contribute to our community both as composer and scholar. As well as giving a public lecture about the literary influences on his symphonic work, he will work closely with our student performers, composers, and musicologists. The UI Symphony Orchestra is one of our largest ensembles on campus; working with Mr. Harbison and Professor Gunn will be a fantastic opportunity for our students. Additionally, we have been able to schedule other concerts featuring his work: on October 20, the Illinois Modern Ensemble and faculty guests will perform a concert of Harbison’s chamber music. This will be a “composer portrait” festival with two big concerts, masterclasses, lessons, and the public lecture.

Harbison MillerComm event

Donald Byrd has been the Artistic Director of Spectrum Dance Theater since December 2002. Formerly, he was Artistic Director of Donald Byrd/The Group, a critically acclaimed contemporary dance company, founded in Los Angeles and later based in New York, that toured both nationally and internationally. His career has been long and complex, and his choreographic and theatrical interests are broad. The New York Times describes him as “a choreographer with multiple personalities … an unabashed eclectic.” He is a Tony-nominated (The Color Purple) and Bessie Award-winning (The Minstrel Show) choreographer.

Mr. Byrd has frequently been referred to as a ‘citizen artist,’ a descriptive that perfectly aligns with an important component of Spectrum Dance Theater’s mission and Mr. Byrd’s personal beliefs – “dance as an art form and as a social/ civic instrument.”

Byrd MillerComm presentation

Artist, writer and teacher, Ricardo Basbaum investigates art as an intermediary device and a platform for the integration of sensorial experiences, sociability and language. Since the late 1980s, he has created a specific vocabulary to his work, applying it in a particular way for every new project. This vocabulary often manifests itself as drawings, installations, videos and urban interventions. Basbaum is the author of an installation that belongs to the Tate Modern Collection in London and took part of exhibitions inside important institutions, such as: Documenta XII in Kassel, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Chicago, the São Paulo’s Biennial, the Secession in Vienna, among others. He also was a resident artist at the Audain Gallery in Vancouver and has held individual projects at the Galician Center for Contemporary Art (Santiago de Compostela) and at The Showroom (London).

Basbaum residency's project is entitled Contamination: An Extended Space for Sustaining Encounters through Art. For more information, please visit http://on-contamination.com/.

IMAGES

Inaugural talk: March 11, 2021, 4:00pm CST. Flyer

Seitu Jones is a Saint Paul (MN) based artist whose interdisciplinary practice considers the historical construct of race and the desire to restore our Beloved communities through food, conversation and beauty. His practice aspires to create environmental and public artwork that honors and inspires communities. Seitu Jones Studio engages, advises and produces work that advances food and environmental justice through the arts and public sphere.

Events scheduled during Mr. Jones' residency:

FALL 2020

Kitchen Conversation October 13

Kitchen Conversation October 15

Town Hall: Food for Justice | Food for Thought October 26

SPRING 2021 April 14, MillerComm presentation

Margaret Wertheim is a writer, artist and curator whose work brings together art, math and science as evidenced in her Crochet Coral Reef, a worldwide project created through hyperbolic crochet. In this lecture Margaret will introduce the UIUC community to her work with the Institute for Figuring, a collaborative Los Angeles based practice she runs with her twin sister Christine Wertheim. Highlighting the “aesthetic and poetic dimensions of science and mathematics,” the sisters design art & science exhibits for galleries and museums around the world. Their Crochet Coral Reef is a global participatory endeavor that sits at the intersection of craft, geometry, community-art and environmentalism. The work has been seen by more than two million people and exhibited at the 2019 Venice Biennale, the Smithsonian, and many other places. Margaret will discuss the interplay of art, science, and art as social practice within the Crochet Reef project, while also promoting UIUC’s very own locally made Urbana-Champaign Satellite Reef, opening at the Siebel Center for Design in spring 2021.

Margaret Wertheim’s work focuses on relations between science and the wider cultural landscape. A two-fold perspective animates her thinking: on the one hand science can be seen as a set of conceptual enchantments that delight our minds and senses; on the other hand science is a socially embedded activity intersecting with philosophy, culture and politics. Wertheim aims to illuminate both dimensions of science and mathematics through her books, articles, lectures, workshops, and art, which has been widely exhibited nationally and internationally.

Listen to Wertheim's September 23, 2021 MillerComm presentation here

The Crochet Coral Reef website.

Linguistics and Literature Section of the Department of Humanities

Pontifica Universidad Catolica del Peru

March 1-April 25, 2019

Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies

Independent photojournalist

8-week residency, Spring 2019

Department of Journalism

Link to MillerComm presentation

Yu-Chen Wang (Guzheng, Chinese zither) and Han-Jui Chen (double bass)

October 28-November 3, 2018

School of Music

Independent artist

October 6-9, 2018

Presentations in the Improvisers Exchange initiative

Multi-media artist

Multiple residencies between September 2018 and September 2019, culminating in the 13-hour participatory installation, One Boy's Day, part of Krannert Center for the Performing Arts' 50th Anniversary Celebration.

Krannert Center for the Performing Arts

Artist Amanda Browder worked with parents, students and community in a large-scale fabric installation at Stratton Elementary School.

Vanderbilt University

Spring 2017

Department of Mathematics

Mount Mercy University

3-week residency, Fall 2016

School of Art+Design

Link to MillerComm presentation

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

April 15-May 31, 2016

Department of Geology

Argentine National Research Council

5-week residency, Spring 2016

Department of Geology

International Artist Collective

February 21-18, 2016

Krannert Art Museum

Ping Chong and Company

January 4-30, 2016

Department of Dance

Link to MillerComm presentation

Ohio State University

Spring 2016 residency

Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies

Link to MillerComm presentation

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

October 12-21, 2015

Department of Physics

Jose Marti National Library of Cuba

October 10-17, 2015

Graduate College of Library and Information Science

Link to MillerComm presentation

Movement Director, Choreographer and Director, former Head of Movement, Royal Shakespeare Company

April 6-May 3, 2015

Department of Theatre

Composer, percussionist

January 25-31, 2015

Robert E. Brown Center for World Music

Link to MillerComm presentation

Composer

November 4-13, 2014

School of Music

Composer

December 2-7, 2013

School of Music

Scholar, Musician and Author, The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience

October 30-November 2, 2013

University of Illinois Press

Link to MillerComm presentation

Ben Gurion University

2-week residency in October 2013

Department of Physics

University of the Western Cape, South Africa

September 16-26, 2013

Department of History

Musical legend

September 12-22, 2013

Residency, School of Music

Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa

Spring 2013

Department of History

University of Cambridge

Fall 2012

Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures

Writer, translator and president, Clásicas y Modernas

Spring 2012

Department of Spanish, Italian and Portuguese

Choreographer, Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People

February 5-15, 2012

Department of Dance

Independent artist, scholar, filmmaker and founder, Kinodance Company

March 12-19, 2011

Department of Dance

University of Texas at Austin

February 2011

Department of History

Link to MillerComm presentation