Music

Lars Mørch Finborud

Art Historian, Former Curator at Henie-Onstad Art Centre, Record Label Owner
Lars Mørch Finborud was a Visiting Lecturer Panel Participant at the Nordic Time Zones Conference at the Arts Research Center on March 26, 2014.

Lars Mørch Finborud (1980, Oslo) is an art historian and worked as a curator at Henie-Onstad Art Centre from 2008-2018. Finborud runs the record labels Plastic Strip Press and O. Gudmundsen Minde...

Fantastic Negrito

Singer-Songwriter of Blues, R&B, and Roots
Fantastic Negrito was a Visiting Artist Panel Participant at the Urban Ghosts Symposium at the Arts Research Center on January 17, 2017.

Part love story, part historical excavation, Fantastic Negrito’s extraordinary new album, White Jesus Black Problems, is an exhilarating ode to the power of family and the enduring resilience of our shared humanity. Inspired by the illegal, interracial romance of his seventh generation grandparents—a white indentured servant and an enslaved Black man—in 1750s Virginia, the collection is bold and thought provoking, grappling with...

Moy Eng

Poet, Vocalist, and Leader of the Community Arts Stabilization Trust
Moy Eng was a Visiting Lecturer Panel Participant at the Urban Ghosts Symposium at the Arts Research Center on January 17, 2017.

Moy Eng leads Community Arts Stabilization Trust (CAST), a community centered real estate organization for the arts. In deep partnerships with community, CAST invests and stewards affordable housing and workspaces across the San Francisco Bay Area. Launched in 2013, CAST has acquired and invested in six arts buildings in San Francisco, Oakland and San Jose, cited as a creative placekeeping model by cultural and civic leaders internationally...

Jeff Davis

University Carillonist
Jeff Davis was a Visiting Lecturer Panel Participant at the made@berkeley Symposium at the Arts Research Center on April 15, 2016.

Jeff Davis, renowned as the University Carillonist at UC Berkeley, retired in 2024 after a distinguished career spanning over three decades. Throughout his tenure, Davis presided over Berkeley's iconic Campanile, home to one of the world's foremost carillons comprising 61 bells. He joined UC Berkeley in 1983, initially supporting the music department with his diverse skills before formally studying under Ronald Barnes, the university's...

DJ Lamont

DJ, Founder of Fingersnaps Media Arts
DJ Lamont was a Visiting Artist Participant at the San Francisco: Looking Back as We Look Forward Conference at the Arts Research Center on June 5, 2015.

DJ Lamont started playing with records when his mother gifted him a “Close N’ Play” record player for his 5th birthday in 1969 and he has been playing with records, cassettes, CD’s, DJ Software, and DJ Controllers ever since.

Established June 1, 2004, in DJ Lamont’s spare bedroom (on 20th & Folsom Street), hundreds of people over the past 15 years of all ages, genders, cultures, and...

Cindy Cox

Professor, Former Chair of the Music Department
Cindy Cox was a Visiting Lecturer Panel Participant at the Dream of the Red Chamber Symposium at the Arts Research Center on September 12, 2016.

Transparent yet richly multifaceted, Cindy Cox’s compositions synthesize old and new musical designs through linked strands of association, timbral fluctuation, and cyclic temporal processes. The natural world, ecology, and the concept of emergence inspire many of the special harmonies and textural colorations in her compositions, as in her piano trio la mar amarga, the octet Cañon, and the string...

Majel Connery

ARC Fellow, Scholar, Vocalist, and Composer
Majel Connery was an ARC Fellow in Spring 2014 – she was chosen in the Faculty Fellow category.

Majel Connery is an unclassifiable artist who rarely says no to anything. Her music ranges from the guttural to the sublime, appearing in punk rock clubs at night and by day at major destinations from The Kennedy Center to The Kitchen.

A vocalist and composer, Connery combines Classical influences with electronic mentality. Her singing has been called “superb” by the New York Times and her composition “thoroughly Schubertian” by the Wall Street Journal...

Yao Chen

Composer, Professor of Composition at the Central Conservatory of Music, Beijing
Yao Chen was a Visiting Artist Lecturer Participant at the Dream of the Red Chamber Symposium at the Arts Research Center on September 12, 2016.

In works of various dimensions, Yao Chen seeks paths toward transcendence. His music, always ritual in nature, eschews contemporary vogues and instead aims at a timelessness and an otherness that exists beyond the standard categories – music for the moment, but also music for then and music for what lies ahead. Whether his work is brittle or forceful, or often both in coexistence, melancholy and a sense of wonder are recurring...

Chris Chafe

Musician, Scientist, Director of the Stanford University Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics
Chris Chafe was a Visiting Artist Panel Participant at the made@berkeley event at the Arts Research Center on April 16, 2016.

Chris Chafe is a composer, improvisor, and cellist, developing much of his music alongside computer-based research. He is Director of Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). In 2019, he was International Visiting Research Scholar at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies The University of British Columbia, Visiting Professor at the Politecnico di Torino, and Edgard-Varèse Guest Professor at the...

Kim Addonizio

Writer, Music-Maker, and Maquisard
Kim Addonizio gave a Visiting Writer Reading at the Arts Research Center in April 2021, part of the Spring 2021 Flash Reading Series.

Kim Addonizio is the author of eight poetry collections, two novels, two story collections, and two books on writing poetry: The Poet’s Companion (with Dorianne Laux) and Ordinary Genius. Her poetry collection Tell Me was a finalist for the National Book Award. She also has two word/...