Praised for her "communicative, emotionally intense expression" (Jerusalem Post) and "technical wizardry and artistic intuition" (Herald Times), harpist Emily Levin has forged a multifaceted career as a soloist, orchestral musician, chamber collaborator, and advocate for new music.

Levin joined the Dallas Symphony Orchestra as Principal Harp in 2016. She has also served as guest principal harp with the Boston and Chicago Symphony Orchestras, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Houston Symphony, and appears regularly with the New York Philharmonic. As a soloist and chamber musician, she has performed at leading venues throughout North America and Europe, and her concerto engagements include performances with the Jerusalem, Dallas, Colorado and West Virginia Symphonies, the Ojai Festival and Lakes Area Music Festival, and the Louisiana Philharmonic.

In 2021, she founded GroundWork(s), an initiative commissioning 52 American composers — one from each state, plus Washington, DC, and Puerto Rico — to write new works centered on the harp. Recent and upcoming commissions have included works by Angélica Negrón, Reena Esmail, Michael Ippolito, Aaron Holloway Nahum, and Jerod Impichchaachaaha Tate.

Levin is the only American to receive top prizes at two of the most prestigious international harp competitions: the USA International Harp Competition and the International Harp Contest in Israel. She was also a winner of the 2016 Astral Artists National Auditions and was named the Classical Recording Foundation's 2017 Young Musician of the Year for her debut album, Something Borrowed.

A committed educator, Levin is currently an adjunct associate professor of harp at Southern Methodist University, and a faculty member at the Aspen Music Festival and the Young Artist's Harp Seminar. She received a Master of Music from the Juilliard School and holds undergraduate degrees in music and history from Indiana University. Her honors history thesis focused on the war songs of the French Revolution.

https://emilylevinharp.com/

Praised by the Ottawa Citizen for her “exquisite playing,” Michelle Gott is a versatile harpist and educator developing new pathways for the harp through interdisciplinary work with dance, film, and theatre.

Michelle’s passion for interdisciplinary collaborations motivates many of her projects. She has created several pieces for harp and dance with Autumn Eckman (dance/choreography), beginning with Drift (for three harps, dance, and film). Presented at the University of Arizona in February 2019, their first project focused on glacial deterioration, set to film by multimedia artist Jonathan Marquis. Joining forces with multimedia artist Dorsey Kaufmann and students at the University of Arizona, Michelle and Autumn created Mirage, a large-scale multimedia performance exploring cognitive dissonance within abusive relationships. This project toured to Iceland in March 2020 where performances were unfortunately cancelled due to the pandemic. Part of the material, however, was transformed into a video collaboration, called Reframe, which premiered virtually in August 2020 for Arizona Friends of Chamber Music.

In the field of contemporary music, Michelle has worked closely with many composers including Andrew Staniland, Pierre Boulez, Roddy Ellias, Virko Baley, Ursula Mamlok, Anthony Cheung, and Nico Muhly. On the orchestral stage, Michelle has subbed extensively with the National Arts Centre Orchestra, including their Canada 150 Tour to the Atlantic Provinces, and with the major orchestras of St. Louis, Houston, Dallas, Phoenix, Montreal, and Toronto. As an educator, Michelle has held teaching positions at the University of Arizona (Tucson), the University of Ottawa, and the Ottawa Youth Orchestra Academy. She has also contributed articles for The American Harp Journal on the life and music of Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer, who was the subject of her doctoral research.

Michelle holds her B.M., M.M, and D.M.A. degrees in Harp Performance from The Juilliard School where she studied with Nancy Allen. She is deeply grateful to Ms. Allen and to the many mentors and teachers throughout her life.

https://michellegott.com/

Starting at age five on his grandmother’s piano, Roddy Ellias has spent most of his life honing musical expression through improvisation. He has performed and recorded with some of the world’s greatest improvisers, including American pianist, Mark Copland, Canadian composer and improviser Amy Brandon, and most recently with the brilliant Jean-Michel Pilc, with whom he will be performing in Ottawa on February 24th at the Steinway 10,000 Hours Concert Venue.

Roddy has taught improvisation to people of all ages and levels, and has given workshops throughout Canada and the US, including UCLA, and ChiArts in Chicago. He was also a full-time professor of composition and improvisation at Montreal’s Concordia University, and his grateful former students are spread all over the planet! He very much enjoys working with anyone keen to let go, to be no-one, to go nowhere :-)

https://www.roddyellias.com/

Described as a “new music visionary” (National Arts Centre), composer Andrew Staniland has established himself as one of Canada’s most important and innovative musical voices. His music is performed and broadcast internationally and has been described by Alex Ross in the New Yorker Magazine as “alternately beautiful and terrifying”.

Important accolades include 3 Juno nominations, an ECMA award, the 2016 Terra Nova Young Innovators Award , the National Grand Prize winner of EVOLUTION (presented in 2009 by CBC Radio 2/Espace Musique and The Banff Centre), and was the recipient of the Karen Keiser Prize in Canadian Music in 2004. As a leading composer of his generation, Andrew has been recognized by election to the Inaugural Cohort of the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists Royal Society of Canada.

Andrew was an Affiliate Composer to the Toronto Symphony Orchestra (2006-09) and the National Arts Centre Orchestra (2002–04), and has also been in residence at the Centre du Creation Musicale Iannis Xenakis (Paris, 2005). Prominent commissioners include the National Arts Centre Orchestra, the Brooklyn Art Song Society, cellist Frances-Marie Uitti, and Les Percussions de Strasbourg. Andrew also performs as a guitarist and with new media (computers and electronics).

Andrew is currently on faculty at Memorial University in St John’s Newfoundland, where he founded MEARL (Memorial ElectroAcoustic Research Lab). At MEARL, Andrew leads a cross-disciplinary research team that has produced the innovative Mune digital instrument: www.munemusic.com

https://www.andrewstaniland.com/

Gabriel José Bolaños Chamorro is a Nicaraguan/American composer of solo, chamber, orchestral and electroacoustic music. He frequently collaborates closely with performers, and enjoys writing music that explores unusual techniques, structures, and timbres. He is interested in computer-assisted-composition, auditory perception, linguistics, graphic notation, improvisation, and modular synthesizers.

Bolaños is currently an Assistant Professor of Music Composition at Arizona State University, where he teaches courses in composition, analysis, music technology, and acoustics, and co- directs the PRISMS contemporary music festival. He received a BA in music from Columbia University and a PhD in Composition and Theory from UC Davis. His music is published by BabelScores.

Bolaños has received numerous awards and grants for his work, including a Fulbright US Scholar Grant, the Suzanne & Lee Ettelson Composer’s Award, a Research & Development Grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, a residency at CMMAS in Morelia, Mexico, a commission from Vertixe Sonora and Hong Kong Baptist University, and a commission from CIRM and Festival Manca in Nice, France.

Beyond his work as a composer and teacher, Bolaños has also written music for film, theater, and dance, has experience performing as a flamenco dance accompanist, and enjoys swimming, gardening, and playing folk music with his wife, Megan.

https://gabrielbolanos.com/

Praised by the New York Times for his “polished orchestration” that “glitters, from big-shoulders brass to eerily floating strings,” Michael Ippolito’s music has been performed by leading musicians in venues around the world. Drawing on a rich musical background of classical and folk music, and taking inspiration from visual art, literature and other art forms, he has forged a distinctive musical voice in a body of work spanning orchestral, chamber and vocal music.

His orchestral music has been conducted by Edo de Waart, Marin Alsop, Michael Francis, David Alan Miller, and Jeffrey Milarsky in performances by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Dallas Symphony Orchestra, San Diego Symphony Orchestra, Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, Nashville Symphony, Florida Orchestra, Cabrillo Festival Orchestra, Albany Symphony Orchestra, and Juilliard Orchestra. His chamber music has been performed by the Attacca Quartet, Miro Quartet, Hub New Music, Altius Quartet, and Dinosaur Annex, among others, and his vocal music has been championed by sopranos Joélle Harvey and Lindsay Kesselman.

He has received commissions from numerous organizations, including Carnegie Hall and The ASCAP Foundation, The Florida Orchestra, Chamber Music America, the University of Georgia Wind Ensemble, Staatstheater Darmstadt, and the New York Choreographic Institute.

He has received numerous awards, from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (Charles Ives Scholarship), The Juilliard School (Palmer Dixon Prize) and ASCAP (multiple ASCAP Plus Awards). Recently, his wind ensemble work West of the Sun was given an honorable mention in the 2014 Frederick Fennell Prize and his String Quartet No. 3 “Songlines” was selected 2019 Call for Scores winner by the Tesla Quartet.

He was a composer fellow at the Aspen Music Festival and the Cultivate program at the Copland House in 2012. From 2004-2011, he was a participating composer and performer in MusicX, an innovative festival of new music in Cincinnati and Switzerland, where he worked as General Manager from 2008-2011. He has also participated in the "Upbeat Hvar" International Summer School in Croatia, Yiddish Summer Weimar in Germany and the Oregon Bach Festival's Composers Symposium.

Ippolito is currently Associate Professor of Composition at Texas State University. He studied with John Corigliano at The Juilliard School and with Joel Hoffman and Michael Fiday at the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.

https://www.michaelippolito.com/