ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Alexander V. Nichols
Alex Nichols' design work spans from lighting and projections to scenery and costumes for dance, theater, and opera. Nichols has designed for companies and artists including Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, Joe Goode Performance Group, ODC/SF, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, San Francisco Ballet, Hong Kong Ballet, National Theater of Taiwan, Paul Dresher Ensemble, Rinde Eckert, Arena Stage Co., and Berkeley Repertory Theater. He has served as Resident Lighting Designer for the Pennsylvania Ballet, and the Hartford Ballet, and as Lighting Director for American Ballet Theatre. Other dance credits include designs for choreographers Mark Morris, Bill T. Jones, Stephen Petronio, Christopher d'Amboise, Val Caniparoli, Sonya Delwaide, Dominique Dumais, Jean Grand Maitre, Kevin O'Day, Kirk Peterson, Dwight Rhoden, Michael Smuin, and Brenda Way.

Larry Neff
Larry Neff has been the lighting designer for the Kronos Quartet for 15 years. He has designed many productions for Kronos, including Live Video, the group's first fully staged concert; George Crumb's Black Angels; Tan Dun's Ghost Opera; and Gabriela Ortiz's Altar de Muertos. Neff, who also acts as Kronos' Production Director, is responsible for the unique visual aspects of the Quartet's concerts, having worked with the group on more than 1,000 concerts throughout the world. Neff has also worked with The Paul Dresher Ensemble (designing Slow Fire, Power Failure, and Pioneer), George Coates performance works (designing RareArea, Actual Sho, and Right Mind (at the Geary Theater), and various other theater and dance companies including ODC San Francisco, Beach Blanket Babylon, and Rinde Eckert.

Mark Grey
Mark Grey is a sound designer and composer living in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has acted as sound designer on many premieres of major theatre, opera, and concert works by John Adams, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and the Kronos Quartet. Recent sound design projects include the critically acclaimed John Adams and Peter Sellars stage productions of El Niño (premiered at Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris in 2000); Adams' most recent orchestral work for the New York Philharmonic, On the Transmigration of Souls (premiered at Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center in September 2002); as well as Philip Glass' Dracula: The Music and Film, with a new score written for the 1931 Universal Pictures release, performed live to the film with Philip Glass and Kronos (premiered at Royal Festival Hall, London in 1999). Grey tours extensively throughout the world with Kronos and frequently designs sound for major opera productions at the Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris. Grey's compositions have been premiered by Kronos, The Paul Dresher Ensemble, The California EAR Unit, and Joan Jeanrenaud.

Larry Springer
Larry Springer is a freelance designer of motion graphics and corporate event staging. He has provided video for Berkeley Repertory Theater and Smuin Ballet. He was a Visiting Assistant Professor of Theatre and Film at Hunter College, New York City and a Lecturer of Theatrical Design at the New School of Social Research, New York City. He currently lives in Kansas.

Catherine Owens
Catherine Owens is an Irish artist living and working in New York. Her work is installation based, the installations originating from drawings and ideas that evolve through sculpture, photography, sound, and video. Owens has also worked as the creative director of screen visuals for the Irish band U2 on their last three world tours. This work has consisted of making video segments in response to the band's musical direction on each tour, and commissioning a series of animations and videos by other artists such as Roy Lichenstein, David Wojnarowicz, and digital projection artist Jennifer Steinkamp, the Keith Haring Estate, and the Warhhol Foundation. Owens has attended two Lincoln Center Director's Labs in New York as an invited artist and is currently working on a documentary/installation about the women who direct traffic for the NYPD at the intersection of Canal St. and Broadway in Manhattan.

Mickey T
Tokyo native Mickey T is a documentary artist, filmmaker, and electronic musician who produces documentary films across a wide range of subjects. His specific focus is creating real-time music and art documentaries through an intensive live collaboration with performing artists. He completed sixteen documentary films in 2002. Mickey T is also a founder of the Drum Machine Museum and curator of the Whitebox VIP Lounge, as well as producer of DMV, a television program showcasing contemporary live audio and visual electronic artists.

Scott Pagano
Scott Pagano is a video and sound artist currently living in San Francisco. His work ranges from experimental video and film pieces to live video performance, and from architectural photography to electronic music composition. Driven by a keen interest in the by-products of machine errors, graphic reworkings of architectural spaces, and breakdowns in communication systems, his work foregrounds both precision image reworking and malfunction fetishism. With a strong desire to create striking content via non-dominant processes, he employs a host of custom image/sound processing tools developed in max/msp/jitter/nato.0+55. Transmission technologies, transportation, the physical layout of cities, and the pathways through which we are "informed" of events around the world are the impetus behind his video and sound compositions.

Trimpin
Trimpin, a sound sculptor, composer, and inventor, is one of the most stimulating one-man forces in music today. A specialist in interfacing computers with traditional acoustic instruments, he has developed a myriad of methods for playing trombones, pianos. and other acoustic instruments using Macintosh computers. Trimpin's work is an ongoing experimentation with different combinations of sound, vision, and movement, which challenge stereotypes and introduce our senses to new perceptions. Although he uses the latest technology, he works with "natural" elements—water, air, light, fire—and reconfigures them into unexpected applications, pushing them beyond their traditional role. Trimpin taught at the Sweelinck Conservatory of Music in Amsterdam from 1985 through 1987 and was co-chair of the Department of Electronic Music under the direction of Dutch composer Ton deLeeuw. Installations of Trimpin's work have been exhibited at several art and science museums, providing opportunities for public interaction with his work. He has also collaborated with choreographer Merce Cunningham, composer Conlon Nancarrow, and composer Henry Brant.

Willie Williams
Willie Williams designs and directs multimedia shows. Over 20 years he has created many highly acclaimed touring productions combining hi-tech media with lo-tech eccentricity. He worked with U2, R.E.M., and David Bowie, producing shows which have become benchmarks within the music industry. U2's 1992 "Zoo TV" tour was recently described by Q magazine as "still the most spectacular show staged by any band." In the world of performance art, Williams has collaborated with Montréal-based La La La Human Steps. Installation work includes the creation of "SkyChurch," a multimedia performance space at the Experience Music Project in Seattle, plus a permanent exhibit at Cleveland's Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Museum. Current shows include the Rolling Stones for whom he has designed the tour's video screen material. He has also designed lighting and video for the Queen musical "We Will Rock You," installed at London's Dominion Theatre. Williams has been honored by his peers several times. In 2001 he received an "EDDY" award in New York for excellence in entertainment design. Wired magazine ranked him as one of the "Top 25 visionaries in entertainment in the year 2000." Lighting Dimensions International awarded him "Designer of the Year" in 1992, as did the UK's Live magazine in 2002.

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