"Chicago based cellist, composer and educator, Tomeka Reid has been described as "a remarkably versatile player," (Howard Reich, Chicago Tribune). Equally adept in classical and jazz contexts, Ms. Reid predominantly finds herself in experimental and improvisatory settings and composes for a wide range of instrumentation, from big band to chamber ensemble. Ms. Reid's music combines her love for groove along with freer concepts.

Ms. Reid is an integral part of Dee Alexander's Evolution Ensemble, Nicole Mitchell's Black Earth Ensemble/Strings, Mike Reed's Loose Assembly, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) Great Black Music Ensemble, and co-leads the internationally recognized string trio, Hear in Now with performances in Poznan, Poland; Paris, France; Rome, Venice, Milan, Italy; Soazza, Switzerland; and in the US: Chicago, New York and Vermont. In addition to the aforementioned ensembles, Ms. Reid performs with many of today's forward thinking musicians in the world of jazz and creative music including Anthony Braxton, George Lewis, Roscoe Mitchell, Jeb Bishop, Myra Melford, Fred Lonberg-Holm, Mary Halvorson, Denis Fournier, Edward Wilkerson and Harrison Bankhead. Ms. Reid also leads her own trio featuring guitarist Matt Schneider and bassist Josh Abrams, for which she composes. Ms. Reid can be heard on numerous studio recordings.

As an educator, Ms. Reid has led string improvisation workshops in Italy and the US. Most recently she co-directed the 2012 Vancouver Jazz Festival’s High School Jazz Intensive. For seven years, Ms. Reid co-directed the string program at the University of Chicago’s Laboratory School for students grade 5 thru 12. Ms. Reid is also an ABD doctoral candidate at the University of Illinois: Urbana-Champaign.

As a composer, Ms. Reid has been commissioned by the AACM, the Chicago Jazz Festival and the Chicago Jazz Ensemble and has had several opportunities to showcase her work abroad at festivals such as Umbria Jazz, An Insolent Noise and Vignola Jazz. She has been nominated and awarded residencies for composition with the Ragdale Foundation and the 2nd Annual Make Jazz Fellowship hosted by the 18th Street Arts Organization. Ms. Reid was selected as a 2012 participant in the Jazz Composers Orchestra Institute held at the University of California: Los Angeles."

"Isidora's work is based on the investigation of sound, starting with the acoustic cello, and developing through amplification, and more recently into analogue synthesizers, vocals and texts. This may be thought of as a geography full of fissures and hidden retreats. The friction, the pressure, the harmonics, the blows, the intervention with objects in the strings, a search for melodies and tones, transform the cello into a poetic body that looks for a story in sound. Her interests are focused on searching in the spectrum of improvised music, in the fields of dance, movement, human voice and its philosophical relations with space, text, time and audience.

She has been part of ensembles such as Ensamble Taller de Música Contemporánea U.C and the Goethe Institut Project "Ensemble Nuevo" and participated in festivals worldwide such as Ars Nova Festival, Ravensburg; Ende Tymes Festival of Noise, New York; Mopomoso Concert Series, Iklectik Ballistik, London; Dara String Festival, Suture Soven, Berlin, and collaborated with improvisers and ensembles in Chile and overseas, such as London Experimental Ensemble.

She has composed music for the dance and theater works "Paisajes" by choreographer Paula Sacur, "Un uno de a dos", by choreographer Teresa Prieto. At present, she is working on experimental songs, combining the use of the cello with the voice, text, and analogue electronics.

Isidora is currently a PhD researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London.

She holds a MMus in Creative Practice from Goldsmiths, and is a graduate in Music Performance from the P. Universidad Católica de Chile."

"Elisabeth Coudoux (born Fügemann) is a cellist at the interface of different musical genres: free improvisation, experimental music, new composed music and jazz. After studying classical studies as a basis, a jazz study was conducted in Cologne with Frank Gratkowski and Prof. Dieter Manderscheid. In addition to her own project (eg Emissatett for what she composed), she is a cellist in many ensembles and works in interdisciplinary projects with dancers, visual artists and writers. She is the initiator and member of IMPAKT, a newly founded collective for free improvisation in Cologne."