VISITATIONSVISITATIONS

Jonathan Berger is the Denning Family Provostial Professor in Music at Stanford University, where he teaches composition, music theory, and cognition at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA).
Jonathan is a 2017 Guggenheim Fellow and a 2016 winner of the Rome Prize.
He was the founding co-director of the Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts (SICA, now the Stanford Arts Institute) and founding director of Yale University’s Center for Studies in Music Technology
Described as “gripping” by both the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, “poignant”, “richly evocative” (San Francisco Chronicle), “taut, and hauntingly beautiful” (NY Times), Jonathan Berger’s recent works deal with both consciousness and conscience. The Kronos Quartet toured recent monodrama, My Lai internationally. Thrice commissioned by The National Endowment for the Arts, Berger’a recent commissions include The Mellon and Rockefeller Foundations, Chamber Music Society, Lincoln Center, and Chamber Music America. Upcoming commissions include an oratorio entitled The Ritual of Breath, and Leonardo, for baritone and chamber orchestra.
In addition to composition, Berger is an active researcher with over 80 publications in a wide range of fields relating to music, science and technology and has held research grants from DARPA, the Wallenberg Foundation, The National Academy of Sciences, the Keck Foundation, and others.

Dan O’Brien is a playwright, poet, essayist, memoirist, and librettist. His play Newtown premiered in 2024 at Geva Theatre, directed by Elizabeth Williamson, and received the Blanche and Irving Laurie Foundation Theatre Visions Fund Award. Also in 2024 he published Flying on Easter and Other Poems with Poetry London Editions. In 2023 he published three books: a memoir entitled From Scarsdale: A Childhood (Dalkey Archive Press), a collection of plays entitled True Story: A Trilogy (Dalkey Archive Press), and a collection of prose poems and photographs entitled Survivor's Notebook (Acre Books). His latest essay collection, Ash: Catastrophe, Performance, & the Craft, will be published by Acre Books in 2027.

O'Brien is a Guggenheim Fellow in Drama & Performance Art. His play The Body of an American will receive its continental European premiere at LAC Lugano, Switzerland, in 2027, in a production directed by Jacopo Gassmann, followed by engagements at Fondazione Teatro di Roma, Teatro di Napoli – Teatro Nazionale, and Teatro Nazionale di Genova. The Body of an American received an off-Broadway premiere at the Cherry Lane Theatre, after a run at Hartford Stage, co-produced by Primary Stages and Hartford Stage, and directed by Jo Bonney (New York Times Critic's Pick). The play won the Horton Foote Prize for Outstanding New American Play, the inaugural Edward M. Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired by American History, the PEN Center USA Award for Drama, the L. Arnold Weissberger Award, and was shortlisted for the Evening Standard's Charles Wintour Award in the UK. The play premiered at Portland Center Stage, directed by Bill Rauch, and received its European premiere in an extended run at the Gate Theatre in London in a co-production with Royal & Derngate Theatre, directed by James Dacre. More recently his play The House in Scarsdale: A Memoir for the Stage, winner of the PEN America Award in Drama, received a critically acclaimed world premiere at Boston Court Pasadena, directed by Michael Michetti, and was nominated for six Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle prizes including Best Play. Dan O'Brien: Plays One is published by Bloomsbury. A collection of his essays entitled A Story That Happens: On Playwriting, Childhood, & Other Traumas was published in 2021 by CB Editions in the UK and by Dalkey Archive Press in the US.

O'Brien's fourth poetry collection, Our Cancers, was published by Acre Books (University of Cincinnati Press) in 2021. His third collection, New Life, was published by CB Editions in London in 2015, and by Hanging Loose Press in Brooklyn in 2016. His second collection, Scarsdale, was published by CB Editions in 2014, and in the US by Measure Press in 2015. His debut collection, War Reporter, was published by CB Editions in London and by Hanging Loose Press in Brooklyn. War Reporter received the Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and was shortlisted for the Forward Foundation's Felix Dennis Prize for Best First Collection, both in the UK. In 2014 O'Brien was the winner of the Troubadour International Poetry Prize.

O'Brien wrote the libretti for Jonathan Berger's Visitations: Theotokia & The War Reporter, two chamber operas commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Mellon Foundation for Stanford Live. Visitations: Theotokia & The War Reporter premiered at Bing Concert Hall at Stanford University and at the Prototype Festival in NYC, directed by Rinde Eckert. This production was performed by New York Polyphony and Mellissa Hughes, and produced by Beth Morrison Projects. An earlier version of Theotokia premiered at the Spoleto Festival USA, performed by Dawn Upshaw.

RINDE ECKERT is a writer, composer, librettist, musician, performer and director.

His Opera / New Music Theatre productions have toured throughout America and to major theater festivals in Europe and Asia. With a virtuosic command of gesture, language and song, this total theatre artist moves beyond the boundaries of what a 'play,' a 'dance piece,' an 'opera' or 'musical' might be, in the service of grappling with complex issues. Eckert describes many of his characters as "little men with big ideas whose consequences of their hubris are often disastrous." Sometimes tragic and austere, sometimes broadly comedic, entirely grounded by presence, his work is alchemical: moving from rumination and distillation to hard-won illumination, or its lack.

Rinde Eckert began his career as a writer and performer

in the 1980’s, writing librettos for Paul Dresher (Pioneer, Power Failure, Slow Fire, Ravenshead). He composed dance scores for choreographers Sarah Shelton Mann and Margaret Jenkins, including the evening-length Woman, Window, Square for The Margaret Jenkins Dance Company.

Rinde began composing and performing his own music/theater works in 1992 with The Gardening of Thomas D, an homage to Dante which subsequently toured the United States and France. Staged works for solo performer include Becoming…Unusual: The Education of an Eclectic; three one-act plays: An Idiot Divine, Romeo Sierra Tango and Quit This House; and works for radio including Shoot the Moving Things and Four Songs Lost in a Wall. In February 2017 Rinde opened the inaugural season of Renée Fleming’s Voices Series at the Kennedy Center where he premiered his recital Rin: Tales from the Life of a Troubadour.

Chris Rountree, is the founder, conductor, and creative director of the path-breaking L.A. chamber orchestra wild Up. The group has been called Searing. Penetrating. And Thrilling by NPR Performance Today and named Best Classical Music of 2012 by the Los Angeles Times. wild Up started in 2010 with no funding and no musicians, driven only by Rountree vision of a world-class ensemble that creates visceral, provocative experiences that are unmoored from classical traditions. In the 17-18 season, Rountree debuts with the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center and with Washington National Opera, conducting Missy Mazzoli Proving Up, and returns to the Los Angeles Philharmonic and San Francisco Conservatory of Music. In the 2016-17 season, Rountree made his debut with San Diego Opera conducting Peter Brook La Tragedie de Carmen, and with the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony, returning to Opera Omaha to conduct Jonathan Dove Flight. Recent highlights include his conducting debut with Los Angeles Opera, conducting the world premiere of David Lang Anatomy Theater; Atlanta Opera, conducting David T. Little Soldier Songs; Diavolo Dance Theater trilogy LEspace du T ps, for which Rountree did the reductions to Esa Pekka-Salonen piece of the same name; the Chicago Symphony Orchestra MusicNOW series; Colorado Music Festival; and Interlochen Center for the Arts. Return engagements included performances with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony (SoundBox), and withemensemble LPR at (le) poisson rouge. He conducted a litany of great ensembles and festivals in the last few years including the Brooklyn Philharmonic; Monday Evening Concerts; the Prototype Festival; Beth Morrison Projects; the American Composers Orchestra; the Winnipeg Symphony; Bohuslav Martinu Philharmonic; American Youth Symphony; and the Rose City Chamber Orchestra. With his eclectic style and resume, he been tapped to curate events for contemporary art institutions, including the Getty Museum, MCA Denver, and the Hammer Museum, where a long-running wild Up residency brought the group to national prominence.

I have built my craft as a filmmaker, designer, choreographer and director, and I often take on more than one of these roles in any given project. I create work that features cohesive and deep expression, integrating influences from design, film, dance, theater, and music. While manipulating the intersections of these forms I seek to discover new expressive and kinetic possibilities in performance, presentation, and design. For me, there is no division between the acts of directing performers, arranging inanimate objects, or articulating light for a camera.

As a director and filmmaker, my work is time-based: I shape constructions and images dynamically through time, bending them through film editing or mechanisms of the stage. As a choreographer and designer, I focus on space: the environment creates context for meaning; design and movement are languages that move the observer in subliminal ways.

My diverse artistic background, combined with my extensive knowledge of technical production, helps me guide composers, performing groups, and arts and educational institutions to realize original and innovative projects. I can provide leadership in all aspects of planning and production, and assist in shaping works that make the very most of artistic and material assets.