American Composers Forum (ACF) is pleased to announce the recipients of this year’s ACF | create awards. Presented in partnership with the Jerome Foundation, which supports early-career artists in Minnesota and the five boroughs of New York City, this program provides funding to composers and collaborators for the creation of a new work. The five awards of $11,000 each include $8,000 toward the commission and $3,000 for production and promotion support.
The 2024 ACF | create awardees are Zack Baltich, Rob Cosgrove, Jhoely Garay, Muyassar Yousef Kurdi, and Shara Lunon. Their projects center personal narratives, draw on cross-cultural connections, and explore multimedia collaborations, representing the depth and breadth of music at the heart of ACF’s mission.
The panel of curators who selected this year’s awardees included Ami Dang, Igor Santos, deVon Russell Gray and Kirsten Volness. To acknowledge the strength of the applications beyond those receiving awards, the panel recognizes Danielle Jagelski, and Hannah Marks as alternates, and has offered honorable mentions to Annie Nikunen and Kevin Ramsay.
Through this program, ACF has helped support hundreds of new works, such as Sarina Partridge’s recording project, Songs to Re-Root & Remember. “Having my album released is already opening doors for touring, performing, and workshop teaching gigs. I am earning income from CD sales that support my continued work as a community-centered artist. In a world that can make it feel almost impossible to pursue a life in creating new music… the ACF | create program made me feel empowered, supported and appreciated for the path I’m on.”
“This investment in the creative process is necessary throughout an artist’s journey, and especially when first building your body of work,” said Vanessa Rose, ACF Executive Director. “And the musical stories from these awardees deserve to be heard. We are grateful for the Jerome Foundation’s continued partnership in helping us to provide this critical support.”
About the ACF | create Awardees
Zack Baltich (he/him)
Zack Baltich — Photo by Sam Wagner
Duluth, MN-based percussionist and composer Zack Baltich creates with a marked purpose: to inspire curiosity in the creation of sound; to instigate empathy in the form of emotional resonance; and to bring satisfaction that comes from long-form music weaving to a clear landing point. In addition to his personal work, Zack has collaborated with Mathew Jazcewski’s Arena Dances, the progressive folk trio Sprig of That, folk band Ginger Bones, and many others. Past projects have been supported by American Composers Forum, Cedar Cultural Center, Minnesota State Arts Board, Prairie Ronde Artist Residency, and Loghaven Artist Residency, and he has performed throughout the United States.
Project Description: In collaboration with ARENA Dances, Zack will create Feed the Crows, an album length work for percussion, electronics, piano, and manipulated samples taken from a 2007 recording of his grandpa playing accordion.
Rob Cosgrove (he/him)
Rob Cosgrove — Photo by Kimberly Spagnola
Rob Cosgrove (he/him; Minneapolis, Mni Sota Mkoce) is a percussionist, composer, and artist interested in creating embodied sounding through intermedia installations and performances. His works explore the feeling of a sound as a tactile, visual, and visceral entity by investigating the peripheries of sonic experience and the ways these contexts affect our perception. Rob has exhibited/performed at Pioneer Works (Brooklyn), Harvestworks (Manhattan), Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (Troy), Chicago Design Museum (Chicago), National Gallery of Art (Washington D.C.), Practice Gallery (Philadelphia), Coaxial (Los Angeles), Eastern Bloc (Montréal), DOX Centre for Contemporary Art (Prague), and KM28 (Berlin).
Project Description: Rhizome Music is a public access composition using performers, drums, radios and live audience audio input to build an Internet of Sounding Things.
Jhoely Garay (she/her)
Jhoely Garay — Photo by Adrian Trevino
Jhoely Garay is a New York-based guitarist, composer, arranger, and educator from Mexico, whose music expresses her passion for straight-ahead swing, contemporary jazz, and musics and rhythms from Latin America. Her work has been presented in important venues in various countries, such as The National Jazz Museum in Harlem, The Public Theater, Aaron Davis Hall, The Clemente, The Metropolitan Museum, and International Jazz Festival Colima Jazz, among others. She has collaborated with iconic artists such as Steve Wilson, Darcy James Argue, and Dee Dee Bridgewater. Garay is a Latin Grammy Cultural Foundation Ambassador, a LMCC and New Music USA Creator grantee, a 2022 Stanford University Jazz Mentor Fellow, an ASCAP 2022 Fran Morgenstern Composition awardee, and a recipient of the 2020 “Young Creators” grant by the National Fund for Culture and the Arts in Mexico. She holds a BM from The City College of New York and a MM from the Manhattan School of Music.
Project Description: Where is Jazz?: Uncovering The Third Root is a multi-movement work for jazz orchestra and Son Jarocho trio that explores the similarities between the two genres to create new repertoire for large ensembles that portrays the often overlooked African influence on Mexican music.
Muyassar Yousef Kurdi (she/her)
Muyassar Yousef Kurdi — Photo by Sawani
Muyassar Kurdi is a Palestinian-American and New York City-based interdisciplinary artist. Her work encompasses sound art, extended vocal technique, performance art, movement, painting, analog photography, and film. Her practice honors the futuristic and ancient through meditative movements and sonic sound explorations. Centered on embodiment with a non-linear approach rooted in improvisation, she explores memory, displacement, and the body in relation to nature. Kurdi received the 2024 Brooklyn Arts Fund and was a finalist in the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship for Combined Disciplines 2023. She was awarded a Roulette Intermedium 2020 commission and 2022 artist residency with support from Jerome Foundation, and is also a recipient of the Queens Fund New Works Grant, NYFA City Artist Corps Grant, and Puffin Foundation Grant. Recent residencies include The Watermill Center with OPERA ensemble and Harvestworks. Love is Blue, Kurdi’s solo exhibition, opened in the Fall 2023 at LaMaMa Gallery.
Project Description: Existence is resistance. For Hind Rajab brings life back to the body with storytelling through an Indigenous lens that highlights the aliveness and vulnerability of the human form, which moves beyond walls, borders, and check-points.
Shara Lunon (she/they)
Shara Lunon — Photo by David Lawrence
Shara Lunon is the product of the evolution of Black American musical traditions. As a transdisciplinary artist, her art finds the ethereal in the chaotic. With voice and electronics as the foundation, Lunon’s art is a synthesis of text, sound, objects, and the underground. Her goal is to challenge lassitude and, in its place, instill hope. Lunon’s work has been featured in The Gothamist; commissioned by Metropolis Ensemble, MATA Festival, and innova Recordings; and has won residencies with OneBeat Fellowship, Papillion Farm, and Audiofemme. Lunon has collaborated with artists including Fay Victor, Ches Smith, Shahzad Ismaily, Darius Jones, Chris Williams, Lesley Mok, and Luke Stewart. Currently, she is working on releasing two projects with her quartet History Dog, and punk band Blasé. Lunon is based in Brooklyn, NY.
Project Description: Blasé emerged from the need to blatantly convey the rage and grief that we experience as Black people in America. Comprising three Black musicians and one accomplice, we are crafting our freshman album.
ABOUT THE JEROME FOUNDATION
The Jerome Foundation, founded in 1964 by artist and philanthropist Jerome Hill (1905-1972), honors his legacy through multi-year grants to support the creation, development, and presentation of new works by early career artists. The Foundation makes grants to early career generative artists, and those nonprofit arts organizations that serve them, in all fields in the state of Minnesota and the five boroughs of New York City. For further information, visit https://www.jeromefdn.org/
ABOUT AMERICAN COMPOSERS FORUM
ACF’s mission is to support and advocate for individuals and groups creating music today by demonstrating the vitality and relevance of their art. We do this by empowering composers, modeling creative partnerships, and advocating for them through storytelling and connections. Working with an ecosystem of artists, programmers, presenters, teachers, funders, and audiences, we frame all of our work with a commitment to racial equity, believing that creating a fairer world for artists benefits all of us.
Founded in 1973 by composers Libby Larsen and Stephen Paulus as the Minnesota Composers Forum, the organization continues to invest in its Minnesota home while connecting artists and advocates across the United States, its territories, and beyond. ACF frames our work with a focus on racial equity and includes within that scope, but does not limit it to: diverse gender identities, musical approaches and perspectives, religions, ages, (dis)abilities, cultures, backgrounds, sexual orientations, and broad definitions of “American.” Visit www.composersforum.org for more information.
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