Residency Participants

Lauren Vandervelden is a violinist and composer based in New York City. She is a recent graduate of The Juilliard School where she was a proud recipient of the John Erskine Prize for exceptional scholastic and artistic achievement. Lauren studied composition with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Melinda Wagner and continues to study violin with Kurt Nikkanen, concertmaster of the New York City Ballet Orchestra. As a winner of the Juilliard Orchestra Competition in February 2020, Lauren was a soloist with The Juilliard Orchestra in Alice Tully Hall, premiering the first movement of her Violin Concerto. Lauren has received numerous national awards in composition, including recognition from BMI, ASCAP, National Young Arts, Tribeca New Music, MTNA, NFMC, and the Frost School of Music. Lauren’s compositions have been performed at numerous venues including Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, Davies Symphony Hall, New World Center, The Juilliard School, Curtis Institute of Music, and the Greek National Opera Alternative Stage (workshop with George Tsontakis). Composer mentors have included John Adams, Aaron Jay Kernis, Stephen Coxe, Eric Nathan, Christopher Theofanidis, and David Ludwig.

Nick Reeves is a 20-year-old cellist from Oakland, California with interests in chamber, solo, and experimental genres. As a chamber musician, he attended Sphinx Performance Academy for three years and made appearances performing at venues, such as the Obama White House in 2016 and the NAMM show in 2017. Currently, Nick collaborates and performs with pianist and mentor, Jerry Kuderna throughout the Bay Area. As a soloist, Nick loves performing the Bach Cello Suites and has appeared at The Oakland Symphony’s Mixtape series and Yo-Yo Ma’s 2018 Oakland Block Party. While involved with Musaics of the Bay, Nick has premiered 4 works and collaborated with Tanya Tomkins, Peter Myers, Nigel Armstrong, Audrey Vardanega and Gabriel Cabezas. Nick has also been heard on “Revolutions Per Minute”, hosted by pianist Sarah Cahill. Apart from his main focus as a classical musician, Nick loves Jazz and experimental music. In these genres, he has played in an experimental music group backing poet Gregg Eisenberg and frequently collaborates and records with, friend and saxophonist Nathan Nakadegawa-Lee. Nick is currently studying with Richard Hirschl at Roosevelt University’s Chicago College of Performing Arts.

Multi-Instrumentalist composer and teacher Chris Rippey explores the interconnectedness of world folk and classical traditions. He is the author and producer of Tales of the Boatman, a storytelling series which integrates diverse instrumental voices, the sounds of nature, and spoken narrative into a tapestry of sound.

Canadian soprano Rose Hegele facilitates artistically rigorous performance experiences that explore the extremes of human vocal and artistic expression in 20th and 21st century art music. She has been lauded for her ease with extended vocal techniques, creating “siren-like sounds that explored extremes of the vocal range” (The Boston Music Intelligencer). Specializing in contemporary opera, chamber music, and improvisation, Ms. Hegele sings to create a space to heal souls and bodies, and to allow humans to embrace all of their complexity and humanity. Highlights include world premiering the roles of “Venus,” “Doctor” and “First Lady” in Andy Vores’s Chrononhotonthologos with Guerilla Opera in 2017; leading ensemble performances in Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and Kian Khalilian’s به تماشای طلوع خورشید… be tamásháye tolúe khorsheed… to watch the sun rise… (In Memory of Abbás Kiárostamí) at Clark University in February 2020; and collaborating with the Berklee College of Music’s Neither/Nor Composers’ Ensemble to perform improvisatory works by George Lewis, Iancu Dumitrescu, Richard Carrick, and Berklee’s student composers.

Lucy Nemeth, 19, is a violinist from Oakland, California. She first found her musical voice at the Crowden School, where she fostered her love for ensemble playing. Now studying with Axel Strauss at the Schulich School of Music at McGill University, Lucy continues to seek out chamber music as much as she can, whether that be in string quartets, orchestral works, or even playing with jazz combos. In addition to Strauss, some of her principal teachers and mentors include Elbert Tsai, Stephen Main, and Jeffrey LaDeur. Lucy has attended summer festivals at the University of Michigan and the Curtis Institute of Music, and has participated in the East Bay Chamber Music Festival as well as the Junior Bach Festival in various choral, orchestral, and chamber ensembles. This summer she will be attending the Bowdoin International Music Festival and will be a participating artist in the Musaics of the Bay Summer Residency Program.

Milad Yousufi is a pianist, composer, conductor, poet, singer, painter and calligrapher. Yousufi’s work is deeply inspired by his country and culture. Yousufi studied piano with Simone Dinnerstien and graduated from Mannes School of Music in spring 2020 and is currently pursuing a masters degree in composition under Dr. Dalit Warshaw's mentorship at Brooklyn College and currently joined as a faculty member at Brooklyn Conservatory of Music.

Praised as a “[musically] eloquent” (San Francisco Classical Voice) player “with the kind of freedom, authority, and strength…that one expects from the world’s finest pianists” and a “bewitching musical presence” (The Piedmont Post), American pianist Audrey Vardanega (b.1995) has performed as a solo and collaborative pianist across Europe, China, and the United States. She is the Founder and Artistic Director of Musaics of the Bay, a nonprofit chamber music series dedicated to connecting musicians, composers and visual artists for collaborations around the world, and the co-founder and COO of Arium TV. She is also the Director of Operations for The Autumn Salon, an invite-only NYC and Boston-based Salon series devoted to bringing together world-class musicians with audiences in intimate settings.

Skyler Lee Baysa is a 17 year-old composer living in Albany, California. He started composing music at the age of 11. His first piece “Otatop’s Variations” received Honorable Mention in the 2017 Morton Gould Young Composer Award Competition. In 2018 the San Francisco Ballet School selected his piece “Sixteen Short Pieces” for their student choreography program. More recently Skyler’s short story “Saffron Tuesday” received Honorable Mention in the 2020 Soul Making Keats Literary Contest.

Sara Barone is a Los Angeles based composer for film and multimedia.  She works collaboratively with filmmakers and musicians to create unique sound worlds specific to each project. Sara has created original music for feature films, short films, television, fashion films, and advertisements.  Her scores have premiered at Cannes, Beverly Hills Film Festival, HollyShorts, San Diego Film Festival, among others. Most recently she scored the psychological thriller feature, Grimcutty, for Hulu. In addition to her independent projects, Sara has written additional music for studio features, including Zack Snyder’s Justice League, Sonic the Hedgehog, Scoob!, the Netflix series, Hit & Run, Love Death & Robots Season 2 (The Drowned Giant), and SHE-RA. Other credits include Godzilla vs. Kong, Terminator: Dark Fate, and AAA video games Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Death Stranding. She also writes original music for the Emmy-nominated composer collective, Bleeding Fingers Music. Sara received an undergraduate degree in music at Columbia University and a masters in 'Screen Scoring' at the University of Southern California.

Lauded as one of today's probing musical voices infused with searing virtuosity, Nancy Zhou is rapidly building an international profile after winning the 2018 Shanghai Isaac Stern Violin Competition. With a robust online presence that seeks to invigorate appreciation for the art and science of the violin, her thoughtful musicianship resonates with a global audience in such a way that brings her on stage with leading orchestras around the world. Making her orchestral debut at the age of 13 with her hometown orchestra, the San Antonio Symphony, Nancy went on to collaborate with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, Finnish Radio Symphony, St. Petersburg Philharmonic, Munich Symphony, Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, Kansas City Symphony, San Diego Symphony, Padua Chamber Orchestra, among others. Upcoming engagements include performances with the China Philharmonic, Hangzhou Philharmonic, Sichuan Symphony, National Taiwan Symphony Orchestra, Orchestra of Perugia, Naples Philharmonic, and the IRIS Orchestra. She has collaborated with conductors such as Jaap van Zweden, Sakari Oramo, Eun Sun Kim, Christoph Poppen, Jean-Jacques Kantorow, Michael Stern, Darrell Ang, Jurjen Hempel, Muhai Tang, Sebastian Lang-Lessing, Guy Braunstein, and Ken-David Masur.

Karna Mendonca is a 22-year-old freelance composer based out of the San Francisco Bay Area. He attended summer programs at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and Interlochen Arts academy, and currently studies both piano and composition with Eric Zivian.Karna participated in both the Stay-at-home Symposium and the Musaics of the Bay Winter Residency, and also helps organize Musaics’ artist gatherings. Currently, Karna is interested in the intersection between visual art and music, improvisation in the classical tradition, and synthesizing concert music with ideas from jazz, flamenco, and other musical traditions. When he is not writing music, Karna also does research in artificial intelligence at UC Berkeley and plays oboe and English horn in the UC Berkeley Symphony Orchestra.

Sarah Cahill, hailed as “a sterling pianist and an intrepid illuminator of the classical avant-garde” by The New York Times and “a brilliant and charismatic advocate for modern and contemporary composers” by Time Out New York, has commissioned and premiered over seventy compositions for solo piano. Composers who have dedicated works to Cahill include John Adams, Terry Riley, Frederic Rzewski, Pauline Oliveros, Julia Wolfe, Roscoe Mitchell, Annea Lockwood, and Ingram Marshall. Keyboard Magazine writes, “Through her inspired interpretation of works across the 20th and 21st centuries, Cahill has been instrumental in bringing to life the music of many of our greatest living composers.” She was named a 2018 Champion of New Music, awarded by the American Composers Forum (ACF).