Michael is a drummer, educator and recording artist based in Brooklyn, New York who has worked with such artists as Wayne Krantz, Joshua Redman, Jason Moran, Tim Lefebvre, James Genus, Sara Caswell, Cyrus Chestnut, Bob Sheppard, Gregory Tardy, Gregg Belisle-Chi, Bob Lanzetti and many others. He is also a founding member of soul-rock band Caitlin Krisko & The Broadcast, which has been recording and touring extensively across the US and Europe since 2010. He has earned degrees from Manhattan School of Music and City College of New York, where he studied under John Riley, Nasheet Waits, Justin DiCioccio and Dan Weiss. As an educator, he has served as adjunct professor at City College of New York, and visiting instructor at various colleges across the country, including University of South Florida, University of North Carolina Asheville and University of Minnesota Morris.
Nick is a four-time Grammy Award winning cellist and one of the most innovative musicians of our time, collaborating with artists including Björk, Wilco, Bryce Dessner, Dawn Upshaw, Philip Glass, and the Bang on a Can All-Stars in tours throughout the world. Currently Professor of Chamber Music and Eminent Scholar at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, he has previously served as faculty at the Longy School of Music, the University of Michigan, and Northwestern University. Nick served for 24 years as the founding cellist and Artistic Director of Eighth Blackbird. For more information, go to nickphotinos.com.
Sara is a Grammy-nominated artist recognized as one of today’s foremost jazz violinists through her lyricism and technical facility. Voted into the DownBeat Magazine Critics and Readers Polls every year since 2013, Sara has released three highly acclaimed solo albums, the most recent of which is The Way to You (2023, Anzic Records). She has performed and/or recorded with such artists as the WDR Big Band, Esperanza Spalding, Brad Mehldau, Brian Blade, John Patitucci, Regina Carter, Donny McCaslin, Henry Threadgill, Darcy James Argue, Linda May Han Oh, Dave Stryker, and Miho Hazama at venues including Carnegie Hall, the Village Vanguard, Birdland, Jazz at Lincoln Center, SFJazz, and the Blue Note (NYC and Tokyo). Currently on faculty at the Berklee College of Music, Manhattan School of Music, The New School, and New York University, Sara regularly appears as a guest artist and clinician at schools and festivals around the world.
Described as “sleek, new” and “hyper- fluent” by the New York Times, Pascal is a Grammy- nominated composer, jazz pianist, and electronic artist whose works range from modern improvised music to hybridizing notation-based chamber music with production-based technology.
Recent compositions include Triple Concerto for violin, percussion duo and orchestra featuring Barbora Kolářová and Arx Duo; Imprints with Alarm Will Sound; I Am Not A Number commissioned by New World Symphony; and Out of the Gate commissioned and premiered by Nu Deco Ensemble.
As a keyboardist, Pascal has played as support for D’Angelo’s Black Messiah tour and Clean Bandit’s Rather Be tour with Australian pop artist Meg Mac. He actively performs with Le Boeuf Brothers, saxophonist Jeff Coffin, jazz vocalist Allan Harris, and his piano trio “Pascal’s Triangle.”
Pascal’s most recent awards include a 2023 Grammy nomination for “Best Instrumental Composition,” a 2023 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2020 Copland House Residency Award, and various Independent Music Awards in “Jazz,” “Eclectic,” “Electronica,” and “Music Video” categories. Pascal has received commissions and grants from NEA, New World Symphony, Nu Deco Ensemble, the Lake George Music Festival, Lincoln Center Stage, Chamber Music America, New Music USA, and ASCAP. He composed music for the 2008 Emmy award-winning movie King Lines, and won first place in the 2008 International Songwriting Competition. Pascal is currently an assistant professor of the practice of music and technology at the Vanderbilt University Blair School of Music, and a “Harold W. Dodds Honorific Fellow” and Ph.D. candidate in music composition at Princeton University.
Amy is an award-winning soprano known for her “high-flying vocals” and “scene-stealing” charisma on operatic and symphonic stages, as well as her multi-disciplinary pursuits as a music educator, producer, and conductor (Opera News). She is known on concert stages for her interpretation of Carmina Burana, including multiple performances with the National Symphony at the Kennedy Center and Wolf Trap, as well as with MidAmerica productions for her Carnegie Hall debut. Career highlights include performances with the Santa Fe Opera, Wolf Trap Opera, Dallas Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Utah Opera, Virginia Opera, National Symphony, San Diego Symphony, New York Festival of Song, Brooklyn Art Song Society, and Virginia Arts Festival. Her operatic and musical theater roles include Cunegonde in Candide, Johanna in Sweeney Todd, Chrisann Brennan in The Revolution of Steve Jobs, Mabel in The Pirates of Penzance, Emily in Our Town, and Phoebe in Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder. She is frequently sought after for contemporary works, including Santa Fe Opera’s world premiere of Sweet Potato Kicks the Sun, where she created the title role, and the workshop of Eurydice with the Metropolitan Opera. In addition to performing, she serves as the director of the Young Voices of Santa Fe Opera.
Upcoming Performances:
Dec 6 – Holiday Concert
Dec 7 – Family Holiday Concert
Zak is an award-winning author and journalist who has spent more than a decade writing about water and conservation issues in the western United States. He is the author of two books published by Torrey House Press, Confluence: Navigating the Personal & Political on Rivers of the New West (2019) and Life After Dead Pool: Lake Powell’s Last Days and the Rebirth of the Colorado River (2024). Zak is the recipient of the Ellen Meloy Desert Writers award and was the Entrada Institute’s writer-in-residence in 2023. Most recently, Zak was the southern Utah reporter for The Salt Lake Tribune. He lives in Bluff, Utah.
Upcoming Performances:
Aug 31 – Red Cliffs I: Colorado Currents
Andrew has performed recitals at Carnegie Hall, the New York Festival of Song (NYFOS), the Ravinia festival, The Cleveland Art Song Festival, Camerata Pacifica, Andre-Turp Society Montreal, Voce at Pace, Cincinnati Song Initiative, Tuesday Morning Music Club, The Phillips Collection, Vocal Arts DC, college campuses around North America, and venues in Italy, Croatia, Greece, and Turkey.
Last season he released his tenth Album: El Rebelde: Gabriela Frank and Dmitri Shostakovich. Andrew has premiered works by Jake Heggie, William Bolcom, Stephen Paulus, Steven Mark Kohn, Lee Hoiby, Tom Cipullo, Thomas Pasatieri, and Gabriela Frank.
He has performed in concert with the Boston POPS, Atlanta Symphony, Boston Baroque, Handel and Haydn, Washington Master Chorale at the Kennedy Center, and National Chorale at Lincoln Center and leading opera roles at Seattle Opera, New York City Opera, Opera Philadelphia, Cincinnati Opera, Minnesota Opera, and many others.
Andrew is a mentor with Bel Canto Boot Camp, a coach with tonebase, and is on the faculty at CU Boulder. He bicycles year-round and for the past 31 years has ridden the Pan Mass Challenge. This is Andrew’s fourth appearance at the Moab Music Festival.
Upcoming Performances:
Sep 2 – Rocky Mountain Power Community Concert
Sep 4 – House Benefit Concert: Bernstein, An Intimate Portrait
Sep 5 – Red Earth: Mid-Century Modern America
Yoshiko, a conceptual artist/choreographer/Artistic Director of The School of Hard Knocks, has been a firebrand of New York’s downtown dance scene since arriving in 1978. She has created more than sixty-five full-length company works, commissions, and site-specific events for venues in thirty-five countries, constantly challenging the notion of performance for both audience and participant. Her work has been presented in such diverse venues as Joyce Theater, the Eiffel Tower, Newcastle Swing Bridge, City Center, Lincoln Center, the former National Theater of Sarajevo, the perimeter of the Hong Kong harbor, World Financial Center, and an ancient ruin in Macedonia, among many others. Yoshiko has received fellowships and awards for choreography and career work from the Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for Artists, Japan Foundation, Meet the Composer Choreographer/Composer Commission, and Philip Morris New Works. She has led workshops and masterclasses and been commissioned to create new work in East and West Europe, Asia, Russia, and the U.S. She received her first BESSIE award for choreography in 1984, and earned four more for her productions in 1992 and 1998. In 2007 she received a BESSIE for Sustained Achievement. She was Artistic Director of the Daghdha Dance Company in Limerick, Ireland, from 2000 to 2003 and has been a guest teacher/choreographer in the M.A. program in dance of the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance.
Upcoming Performances:
Sep 7 – Robert Black: A Joyful Musical Life from the Bass Line
Mark is a multi-instrumentalist, singer, song leader, composer and instrument designer heard around the world performing old and new music. Since 1998 he has recorded and toured as guitarist and Musical Director with Paul Simon. A founding member of the Bang on a Can All-Stars & the Polygraph Lounge with keyboard & theremin wizard Rob Schwimmer, Mark has also worked with Steve Reich, Sting, Anthony Braxton, Bob Dylan, Wynton Marsalis, Meredith Monk, David Krakauer & Klezmer Madness, Stevie Wonder, Phillip Glass, Iva Bittova, Geoffrey Holder, Bruce Springsteen, Terry Riley, Ornette Coleman, Don Byron, Joan Baez, Hugh Masakela, Paul McCartney, Cecil Taylor, Ani DiFranco, Bill Frisell, Jimmy Cliff, the Everly Brothers, Steve Gadd, Fred Frith, Alison Krauss, Bobby McFerrin, David Byrne, James Taylor, The Roches, Aaron Neville, Bette Midler, and Marc Ribot. He is the inventor of the WhirlyCopter, a bicycle-powered Pythagorean choir of singing tubes and the Big Boing, a 24 ft. sonic banquet table Mbira that seats 30 children playing 490 found objects, and is a Visiting Lecturer in musical instrument design at MIT. Mark is also a curator at MASS MoCA of the immersive Gunnar Schonbeck exhibit of musical instruments and co-founder, with his partner in sound and life Karen Curlee, of soundstewArt inc. a company that designs immersive sound environments & community music making experiences for all.
Upcoming Performances:
Sep 7 – Robert Black: A Joyful Musical Life from the Bass Line
Sep 8 – Sips & Sounds
Ariadne, praised for her “luminous, expressive voice,” “searing top notes,” and “dusky depths,” (NYTimes), enjoyed a casual child career as a “boy” soprano at the LA Opera, eventually making an adult debut singing Lutoslawski’s Chantefleurs et Chantefables with the American Symphony Orchestra. She starred in operas ranging from Donizetti’s Elixir of Love with The Orlando Philharmonic, to Poulenc’s Les Mamelles de Tirésias at the Aldeburgh Festival, and Atthis, by G.F. Haas, which the NY Times called “one of the most searingly painful and revealing operatic performances in recent times.”
Recent projects included performances with William Kentridge in the Oslo Opera House, The Luxembourg Philharmonic, Berkeley Cal Performances, and Performa in New York of the Dada masterpiece Ursonate, collaborations with The Knights, two projects of her own called Bird Party and Eleven Wild Geese commissioned by The Ultima Festival in Norway, a film of Table Manners, by Sheree Clement, and a film of We Need To Talk, a new monodrama by Caroline Shaw and Anne Carson for Opera Philadelphia. Highlights this season include Alyssa Weinberg’s monodrama Isola with Long Beach Opera, Miss Adelaide in Guys and Dolls with Opera Saratoga, Ten Transcendental Etudes, by Nick Brooke, at Mass MoCA, and The Fall of Rome with AMOC. Ariadne has premiered upwards of twenty new operas and more than a hundred new chamber works.
Upcoming Performances:
Aug 31 – Red Cliffs I: Colorado Currents
Sep 1 – Music Hike II: Just Breath(e)
Sep 2 – Rocky Mountain Power Community Concert