"Elliott Sharp is an American multi-instrumentalist, composer, and performer.

A central figure in the avant-garde and experimental music scene in New York City for over 30 years, Elliott Sharp has released over eighty-five recordings ranging from orchestral music to blues, jazz, noise, no wave rock, and techno music. He leads the projects Carbon and Orchestra Carbon, Tectonics, and Terraplane and has pioneered ways of applying fractal geometry, chaos theory, and genetic metaphors to musical composition and interaction.

His collaborators have included Radio-Sinfonie Frankfurt; pop singer Debbie Harry; Ensemble Modern; Qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan; Kronos String Quartet; Ensemble Resonanz; cello innovator Frances Marie Uitti; blues legends Hubert Sumlin and Pops Staples; pipa virtuoso Min-Xiao Feng; jazz greats Jack deJohnette, Oliver Lake, and Sonny Sharrock; multimedia artists Christian Marclay and Pierre Huyghe; and Bachir Attar, leader of the Master Musicians Of Jajouka.

Sharp is a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow, and a 2014 Fellow at Parson's Center for Transformative Media. He received the 2015 Berlin Prize in Musical Composition from the American Academy in Berlin. He has composed scores for feature films and documentaries; created sound-design for interstitials on The Sundance Channel, MTV and Bravo networks; and has presented numerous sound installations in art galleries and museums. He is the subject of a new documentary "Doing The Don't" by filmmaker Bert Shapiro."-Elliott Sharp

"Tracie Morris is an award-winning American poet. She has also served as a performance artist, vocalist, voice consultant, page-based writer, critic, scholar, bandleader, actor and consultant. Morris is from Brooklyn, New York. Morris' sound poetics have long been progressive and improvisational. She is a tenured professor.

Tracie Morris earned a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Poetry at Hunter College and her Ph.D in Performance Studies at New York University with an emphasis on speech act theory, poetry and Black aesthetics, under the supervision of José Esteban Muñoz. She also studied classical British acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (London) and American acting techniques and voice at Michael Howard Studios.

Morris writes about abuse, power, race, gender and the body, among other topics, through reverberation and accumulative alterations or substituting, thereby creating dynamic and intimate work. Although primarily known for her live performances, Morris has written several books and has been heavily anthologized as a writer as a poet, interviewer and essayist.

Morris emerged as a poet, performer and writer from the Lower East Side poetry scene in the early 1990s. She became known as a local poet in the "slam" scene of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe in New York City, New York, and eventually made the 1993 Nuyorican Poetry Slam team, the same year she won the Nuyorican Grand Slam. She competed in the 1993 National Poetry Slam held that year in San Francisco with other poets from the Nuyorican team. Morris also won the "national haiku slam" that year and her interest in the form lead her to Asia to research poetic forms and cultures from the region in 1998. She is the recipient of NYFA, Creative Capital, Asian Cultural Council and other grants, fellowships, residencies and other awards for poetry including the Yaddo, Millay, MacDowell colonies. She has been a member of the MLA (Modern Language Association), Associated Writing Programs, The Shakespeare Society and The Shakespeare Forum. Her work has been featured in Fuse Magazine, The Amsterdam News, The Village Voice, Tribes Magazine, Bomb Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail and San Francisco Weekly as well as many cultural and scholarly journals. She has performed at Lincoln Center, St. Mark's Poetry Project, CBGBs, Lollapalooza, SxSW, The Whitney Museum, MoMA, Albertine, The New Museum, Centre Pompidou (Paris), Centre for Creative Arts (Durban), Victoria and Albert Museum, Queensland Poetry Festival (Brisbane, Melbourne) and many other regional, national, and international venues. She has presented her work throughout Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe.

Morris began performing with music from the outset of her poetry career- those initial collaborations beginning with musicians she met as a member of the Black Rock Coalition. Morris' work is embraced by slam and performance poets as well as the Language Poets, a contemporary poetic avant-garde. She is featured, for example, on Charles Bernstein's Close Listening radio program and was featured at a 2008 conference on Conceptual Poetics alongside Bernstein, Marjorie Perloff, Craig Dworkin and others. Morris also received the Creative Capital Performing Arts award in the year 2000. In addition to being an experimental poet, Morris writes poetry in conventional forms and forms.

Morris is known as a sound artist and specialist in sound poetry as well as an occasional theatrical performer. (She is also a singer with composer/musician Elliott Sharp's band, Terraplane, and her eponymous band.) She has studied British acting technique as well as Laban and Meisner techniques in the United States. Her work was featured in the 2002 Whitney Biennial. In 2008 her poem "Africa(n)" was included on the compilation album Crosstalk: American Speech Music (Bridge Records; produced by Mendi & Keith Obadike). Morris has taught in several institutions of higher education (she is a full professor at Pratt Institute, specializing in Performance Studies, literature and popular culture, African diaspora culture, Shakespearean sonnets, and voice). She was the 2007-2008 Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania., is a 2018 Master Artist of the Atlantic Center for the Arts and the 2018 WPR Fellow at Harvard University. Morris has been the inaugural Distinguished Visiting Professor of Poetry at the Iowa Writers Workshop since January, 2019.

Morris presents workshops on creative writing, voice and strategic planning for activists, artists, youth, women, underserved communities as well as private and non-profit organizations. She has served on panels, given talks and has been a guest artist for prestigious educational organizations including Modern Language Association, Associated Writing Program, Columbia University, Princeton University, MIT, Pomona College, Dartmouth College, Smith College, University of Arizona, among others. Morris has been a consultant for educational and arts organizations. She has served on Board of Trustees/Board of Directors, committees and Artist Advisory boards for: the New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, the Black Rock Coalition, Pew Center for Arts and Culture, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Creative Capital Foundation, the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses, Pratt Institute and the Cave Canem Foundation, among others. She is also an in-demand workshop leader for innovative poetry conducting intensives for many organizations including St. Mark's Poetry Project, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Poets' House, Naropa University, Kore Press and Cave Canem Foundation."

"Rie Watanabe was born in Hokkaido, Japan in 1979. In 1999 she began studying drums at the National University of Fine Arts and Music in Tokyo under Makoro Aruga, Michiko Takahashi and Takafumi Fujimoto. Since 2005 she has studied at the College of Music in Karlsruhe under Prof. Isao Nakamura, Prof. Hans-Jörg Bayer, Prof. Jürgen Heinrich, Thomas Hoefs and Jochen Brenner.

Between 1999 and 2005 she was a member of the high-powered Ching-Dong Orchestra "Chanchiki tornade" in Tokyo, conducted by the composer Yuya Honda. She has also been a member of the New Music ensemble "Ensemble Bois" in Tokyo, conducted by Takeo Hoshiya, since 2003.

She has performed with a number of ensembles and orchestras, including the Musikfabrik Cologne, Klangforum Vienna, Chamber Ensemble for Modern Music Berlin, Ensemble Laboratorium, Ensemble 2x2 and the State Theatre of Baden.

She has also participated in several international music festivals, like the ISCM (Yokohama, Stuttgart), Witten Days for New Chamber Music (Witten), "Piano+" Festival (Karlsruhe), Klangwerkstatt (Berlin), "SINKRO" Festival, Vienna Festival Weeks, the electronic music festival "dBâle" (Basel), the ICMC (Basel) and others.

In 2004 she was awarded the Saji Keizo Prize by the Suntry Music Foundation for her performance in Chanchiki tornade, and in 2006, she received a scholarship from the International Summer Courses for New Music in Darmstadt. The Japanese government awarded her a scholarship to participate in the Overseas Study Program for Artists in 2006. In that same year, Watanabe established a drums/electronic music duo together with Shingo Inao "Ryngo". In addition, she has played together with the pianist Marcelo Silvagama since 2007."

"Michael Weilacher was born (1969) in Rochester, NY where he grew up studying the piano and later percussion at the Eastman School of Music. Michael was in his earliest years active in the local orchestra scene as well as the rock music scene. He later attended the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music where he studied with Alan Otte and the Percussion Group Cincinnati and received his Bachelor's diploma in music performance. While in Cincinnati he worked as a freelance musician in diverse rock groups, a steel drum band as well as with dancers from different schools in the area including from the Conservatory. After finishing his Studies, he received an invitation to study as an assistant to marimba player Robert Van Sice at the Rotterdamse Conservatorium in the Netherlands. He did his first performances in Europe in Gent, Belgium (1992) in the New Ears festival with the guest composer Mauricio Kagel. There he became acquainted with several Belgium composers and musicians alike; Frank Nuyts, Karel Goeyvaerts, Lucian Goethals, Gotfried Willem Raes, Luk Vaes and Geert Logghe to name a few. While studying in Rotterdam, Michael became acquainted also with the Belgium new music ensemble Champ d'Action and after receiving his 'Masters' diploma, moved to Antwerp to work with the ensemble.

Michael moved to Belgium in 1993 and worked there both as a soloist and as a performer in several music groups; ensemble Musique Nouvelle, Zeitklang (with Alain Franco), Ictus ensemble, QO2, Blindman Quartet, the Royal Flemish Opera (with Rene Jacobs), the Royal Flemish Philharmonic, Il Novecento, the Young Philharmonic Orchestra, and several others.

Michael's solo carrier has brought him recognition in Europe as well as abroad where he has performed and given master classes in Brazil, U.S.A., Canada, Finland, Italy, Portugal, France, Poland, Greece and elsewhere. He has worked with the composers James Wood, Steve Reich, Helmut Lachermann, Volker Staub and the Belgium composers Serge Verstockt, Geert Logghe, Frank Nuyts, Eric de Visser, Frederic Rzewski (lives in Brussels),and Karel Goeyvaerts. Michael has made recording of works from these composers as well as some of his own works for solo percussion as well as ensemble pieces. Michael has been working extensively with vzw De Krijtkring and the artistic director Luc Mishalle, where he performed for the opening ceremonies of Brussels 2000, Cultural Capital of Europe, and furthermore composed pieces for Fanfarrah who performed in the Zinneke parade as part of Brussels 2000.His work with the this organization led him into other fields including music theater, where he along with Luc Mishalle and Guy Cassiers created a piece based on texts from the American writer Sam Shepard.

Michael has worked with the Ictus ensemble and the Rosas dance company where he performed the new creation APRIL ME in the De Munt theatre in Brussels. He continued to work with other dancers in Belgium including ex Rosas dancers Vincent Dunoyer and Roberto Olivan. Michael has recently worked with the world renowned dance company Sasha Waltz and guests where he played with the German new music ensemble Musik Fabrik for the opening of the new art center Radial System in Berlin.

He has recorded a full length CD with the composer Paulo Chagas and will be performing some of his music next year in Brazil as well as in California. Michael plans to continue his work with Ictus and will be giving workshops in Bethlehem, South Africa, Mozambique as well as concerts and workshops in the US.

Michael performed and composed for Kris Dane and The Banned and Ictus ensemble. He is also engaged to write and record music for some short films as well as a proposal to perform for a new dance piece that will take place in Frankfurt in September and October 2007.

Michael currently lives in Berlin, Germany and performs regularly with Kammer Ensemble Neue Musik Berlin, Musikfabrik, Ictus Ensemble and with Sasha Waltz@Guests. Likewise he has recorded for film and radio and is currently involved in numerous projects ranging from film music to Dub. Michael's interest in hand drumming has as well led him to the Tablas. He is currently studying in Berlin with the world renowned Tabla guru Pandit Sankha Chatterjee. Michael has previously studied diverse hand drumming techniques from Darbukka to Pandiero but considers himself to be an autodidact and improviser on these instruments as well a highly skilled percussionist and interpreter of contemporary music. Michael has played the Tablas for film recordings in Berlin and plays Tablas as well as vibraphone and percussion in the band "5 Star Hotel"."