About the Gala Speakers

Jennifer Kessler - Jennifer Kessler is the Executive Director of the International Contemporary Ensemble, following 15 years of leading community, education, social justice, and artistic programs with U.S and international arts organizations. Previously, Jennifer served as Executive Director of Willie Mae Rock Camp, and in Education positions at Carnegie Hall, the League of American Orchestras, and Orchestra of St. Luke’s. As a consultant, Jennifer has produced and designed concerts, education initiatives, and special projects for the Los Angeles Philharmonic; Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra; Bang on a Can’s OneBeat; and for jazz musicians Joshua Redman and Miguel Zenon. Jennifer began her career as a French horn player, and holds a Bachelor’s degree in music from Northwestern University in Illinois; a Master’s from Hanns Eisler Musikhochschule in Berlin, Germany; and a graduate certificate of nonprofit management as an El Sistema Fellow at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston. Jennifer is an Adjunct Professor on Entrepreneurship and Leadership in the Arts, at SUNY New Paltz, New York.

Josh Rubin -Joshua Nathan Rubin is a founding member, board member, and Artistic Director Emeritus of the International Contemporary Ensemble. As a clarinetist, the New York Times has praised him as, "incapable of playing an inexpressive note." He has collaborated with many of the foremost composers and performers of our time, and this season is featured in performances in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, Houston, Geneva, Bergen, and Berlin. He is also a software designer who developed LUIGI—arts management software used by over 500 artists, staff, and administrators in 2022—that is available to ensembles and other organizations who value transparency and collective management. He maintains an artistic presence in New York and Los Angeles.

Rebekah Heller - Rebekah Heller is a bassoonist of both highly notated and improvised music, a conductor, composer, educator, curator, arts leader, organizer, and thought partner. Called "an impressive solo bassoonist" by The New Yorker, Heller made her solo debut with the New York Philharmonic in September 2018. As bassoonist (since 2008) and former Artistic Director of the International Contemporary Ensemble, Heller has collaborated with hundreds of composers worldwide to make countless groundbreaking new chamber and solo pieces come to life. Heller has been on the faculty of the College of Performing Arts (CoPA) and The Mannes School of Music at The New School since the fall of 2019, where she leads a bassoon studio, co-chairs the wind department, and teaches classes in contemporary repertoire and experimental music practices. 
More info at rebekahheller.com

Ross Karre (he/him b. 1983 in Michigan) is a percussionist, filmmaker, and producer based in Oberlin, OH and New York City. He is the associate professor of percussion at Oberlin Conservatory. After completing his Doctorate in Music at UCSD with Steven Schick, Ross formalized his visual studies with a Master of Fine Arts. He is a percussionist for the International Contemporary Ensemble where he was artistic director from 2016 to 2022. He has performed regularly with red fish blue fish, Third Coast Percussion (Chicago), and Yarn/Wire (NYC). He has performed at major festivals all over the world, including the Mostly Mozart Festival (NYC), the Holland Festival (Netherlands), Ojai Festival (CA), LA Phil Noon to Midnight, Lucerne Festival, Taipei International Percussion Festival, Big Ears (TN), MONA FOMA (Tasmania), Diskotek (Greenland), and Music Today Biennial (Brazil). 10.67 Cycles, Karre's solo album featuring the music of Ash Fure and Pauline Oliveros, is available on Bandcamp. His video design work has been presented all over the world in prestigious venues such as the Kulturkirche Liebfrauen Duisburg, Muziekgebouw Amsterdam, BBC Scotland, Western Front, MCA Chicago, the Park Avenue Armory, the Kennedy Center, The Kitchen, Roulette Intermedium, Miller Theatre at Columbia University, and the National Gallery of Art. Karre's archival documentary and documentation work preserves unique moments in the creative processes of Claire Chase, Pauline Oliveros, Steven Schick, Matthias Kaul, Fritz Hauser, and creative collaborations of Third Coast Percussion, Yarn/Wire, ICEensemble, Mount Tremper Arts, Baryshnikov Arts Center, and the Oberlin Percussion Group. 

Marcos Balter - Born in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), composer Marcos Balter has worked with many of today’s most prominent artists in classical and popular music, from Paul Simon to the New York Philharmonic. Praised by the New York Times as “spellbinding,” his music has received awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Library of Congress, Civitella Ranieri, Fromm Foundation at Harvard, Chamber Music America, and the Leonard Bernstein Foundation at Tanglewood. His vast discography includes collaborations with the indie-rock band Deerhoof, DJ King Britt, and the International Contemporary Ensemble, among others. He lives in Manhattan, where he shares his time between composing and teaching at Columbia University as its Fritz Reiner Professor of Music Composition. 

Tania León  - Tania León (b. Havana, Cuba) is highly regarded as a composer, conductor, educator, and art advisor. Her orchestral work Stride, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic, was awarded the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Music. In 2022, she was named a Kennedy Center Honoree for lifetime artistic achievements.
A founding member of the Dance Theatre of Harlem, León instituted the Brooklyn Philharmonic Community Concert Series, co-founded the American Composers Orchestra’s Sonidos de las Américas Festivals, was New Music Advisor to the New York Philharmonic, and is the founder/Artistic Director of Composers Now, a presenting, commissioning and advocacy organization for living composers.
Recent premieres include works for Los Angeles Philharmonic, Arkansas Symphony Orchestra, NDR Symphony Orchestra, Grossman Ensemble, and International Contemporary Ensemble. Appearances as guest conductor include Orchestre Philharmonique de Marseille, Gewandhausorchester, Orquesta Sinfónica de Guanajuato, and Orquesta Sinfónica de Cuba. Upcoming commissions feature works for the League of American Orchestras, and Claire Chase, flute, and The Crossing Choir with text by Rita Dove.
Honors include the New York Governor’s Lifetime Achievement, inductions into the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and fellowship awards from ASCAP Victor Herbert Award and The Koussevitzky Music and Guggenheim Foundations, among others.

Claire Chase - described by The New York Times recently as “the North Star of her instrument’s ever-expanding universe,” is a musician, interdisciplinary artist, and educator. Passionately dedicated to the creation of new ecosystems for the music of our time, Chase has given the world premieres of hundreds of new works by a new generation of artists. She was the first flutist to be awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2012, and in 2017 was the first flutist to be awarded the Avery Fisher Prize from Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. Chase has been awarded Honorary Doctorates from The Curtis Institute of Music and The Cleveland Institute of Music.
As an undergraduate at Oberlin Conservatory, Chase co-founded the International Contemporary Ensemble, incorporating the organization in 2001 in New York and Chicago, and spearheading an artist-driven organizational model that earned the group the Trailblazer Award from the American Music Center in 2010 and the Ensemble of the Year Award in 2014 from Musical America Worldwide. Chase served as the Ensemble’s executive/artistic director for seventeen seasons, and as an ensemble member on performance projects on five continents. 
In 2013, Chase launched the 24-year commissioning project Density 2036. Now in its eighth year, Density 2036 reimagines the solo flute literature over a quarter-century through commissions, performances, recordings, education, and an accessible archive at density2036.org. Each season until 2036, Chase premieres a new program of commissioned music, with eight hours of new repertory created to date. At the conclusion of the project, she will play a 24-hour marathon of all of the repertory created in the project. Chase released the world premiere recordings the first five years of the Density cycle in collaboration with the producer Matias Tarnopolsky at Meyer Sound Laboratories in Berkeley, CA in December 2020, and will release the 2019-2021 cycles on a triple-album on New Focus Recordings in Fall 2022.
A deeply committed educator, Chase is currently Professor of the Practice in the Department of Music at Harvard University, where she teaches courses on contemporary music, interdisciplinary collaboration, nonprofit arts organizations, and community-building through the arts. From 2016-2019, she founded and served as co-artistic director, with her longtime collaborator Steven Schick, of Ensemble Evolution, a hybrid summer intensive designed to foster a holistic understanding of the artist as a global citizen at Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity in Canada. Ensemble Evolution is now a project of the International Contemporary Ensemble in collaboration with The New School's College of Performing Arts (CoPA) in New York City.  From 2014-2018, Chase was a Fellow at Project&, a Chicago-based social justice organization founded by Jane M. Saks. Chase collaborated with Project&, the composer Marcos Balter and the director Douglas Fitch on the creation of Pan, an evening-length musical drama for flutist and an all-ages ensemble of community members, which Alex Ross of The New Yorker called “art as grassroots action.” Pan will be presented this season at Lincoln Center in collaboration with The Juilliard School, and next season in collaboration with the San Francisco Symphony and the Cité de la Musique in Paris.
Upcoming projects include performances of Felipe Lara’s new duo concerto for Chase and Esperanza Spalding with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and New York Philharmonic, conducted by Susanna Mälkki; a collaboration with the Ecuadorian anthropologist Eduardo Kohn and the Sapara Nation Forest Defender Manari Ushigua on Pauline Oliveros’ “The Witness”; and performances of Liza Lim’s “Sex Magic,” an evening-length solo for contrabass flute, electronics, and an installation of kinetic percussion at Queen Elizabeth Hall in London and Die Akademie der Künste in Berlin. Chase is currently a Creative Associate at The Juilliard School and a Collaborative Partner with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the San Francisco Symphony.
Chase grew up in Leucadia, CA with the childhood dream of becoming a professional baseball player before she discovered the flute. She lives in Brooklyn.
www.clairechase.net

George Lewis -George Lewis is an American composer, musicologist, computer-installation artist, and trombonist. He is the Edwin H. Case Professor of American Music at Columbia University, and Area Chair in Composition, as well as Artistic Director of the International Contemporary Ensemble. A Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, and a member of the Akademie der Künste Berlin, Lewis’s other honors include the Doris Duke Artist Award (2019), a MacArthur Fellowship (2002), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015). A member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) since 1971, Lewis’s work is presented by ensembles worldwide. He is widely regarded as a pioneer in the creation of computer programs that improvise in concert with human musicians. His book, A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press, 2008) received the American Book Award and the American
Musicological Society’s Music in American Culture Award. Lewis (with Benjamin Piekut) is the co-editor of the two-volume Oxford Handbook of Critical Improvisation Studies (2016). Lewis holds honorary doctorates from the University of Edinburgh, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, Oberlin College, and Birmingham City University, among others (https://music.columbia.edu/bios/george-e-lewis).

Winsome Brown - Winsome Brown is a writer, director, and Obie winning actor. A longtime fan and former board member of ICE, she is delighted to be working with Claire Chase on "Intensity 20.15, Grace Chase" by Pauline Oliveros for Claire's Density 2023 and in tandem with her own play "This is Mary Brown" for PS21 in Chatham, NY. She and Claude Arpels will celebrate their 18th wedding anniversary on February 1st. Happy 20th, ICE!
winsomebrown.com
@thewinsomebrown