Ania Vu is a Polish composer-pianist of Vietnamese descent whose music explores the intersections of language, time, and the sounds of nature. Her method, which she describes as “composing text to write music,” involves crafting her own texts in Polish and English, which guide the sound, form, and character of her compositions. Praised by the Boston Globe as showcasing “artful vocal writing [that] ranges from percussive whispers to glinting, pure-voiced lines,” Ania’s work has been recognized the American Opera Project, ASCAP, Copland House, Tanglewood, the Boston New Music Initiative, and ISCM. She was the 2024 Composer-in-Residence at the Chelsea Music Festival and the 2022-23 Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Chicago. Ania currently lectures at both the University of Chicago and Northwestern University, and has taught at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania and her B.M. in composition and theory from the Eastman School of Music. 

Will Stackpole was born in 1990 and raised in a small town outside Manchester, NH. He began as an electric guitarist and audio engineer. In the last decade he has emerged as one of the most exciting new voices in American concert music. He is noted for his visionary approach to orchestral music, winning the 2019 Rudolph Nissim prize, alongside his dynamic works for chamber ensembles. His music has been performed nation-wide by notable ensembles like the American Composers Orchestra, the NJ Symphony, and Attacca Quartet.

Stackpole has the unique ability to transform his sound between projects according to their themes. The result is music which teeters at the edge of tonality and has been called, "Lively… interesting… and possessing a savage charm.” (NY Times)

Stackpole holds MM and DMA degrees from the Juilliard School. He lives in New York and is a lecturer and composition instructor at Stevens Institute of Technology.

Marc Migó was born in 1993 in Barcelona. His fascination with music and composition blossomed during his teens after his grandfather gifted him a complete Deutsche Grammophon Collection, with Mozart’s Requiem remaining a personal favorite. He studied piano privately with Liliana Sainz and music theory with Xavier Boliart, leading to his acceptance in the Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya where he studied with Salvador Brotons.

In 2017, Marc was accepted into The Julliard School as a CV Starr Fellow to pursue his master’s in music. While at Julliard, he was awarded the 2018 Orchestral Composition Prize, and would win the prize again in 2021. Following his enrollment in Julliard’s inaugural Opera Lab program, Marc received a commission from UrbanArias in Washington DC to compose an original opera with librettist John de los Santos as part of the Decameron Opera Coalition. The resulting piece, The Roost, premiered later that year and was inducted into The Library of Congress’ Performing Arts COVID-19 Response Collection. After receiving his masters, Marc continued his compositional studies with John Corigliano in pursuit of his prospective doctorate to be awarded in 2024.

Marc’s other commissions include The Fox Sisters (libretto by Lila Palmer) for The Liceu, Concerto Grosso "The Seance" for Verità Baroque, L’Illa Deserta for the Foundation for Iberian Music at CUNY, Faust [working title] for Dutch National Opera, and his first symphony for Metamorphosen Berlin. In addition, he has received the Pablo Casals Award (2019), the George Enescu Prize (2020), Organ Taurida Competition’s First Prize (2021), the inaugural Dominic Argento Fellowship for Opera Composition (2021), and the Leo Kaplan Award (2023.) Marc’s music has premiered and been performed in prestigious venues around the world, including Bunka Kaikan (Tokyo), Alice Tully Hall and National Sawdust (New York City), Konzerthaus (Berlin), Palau de la Musica (Barcelona), L’institut de France (Paris), and Tchaikovsky Concert Hall (Moscow). Marc currently divides his time between Barcelona and New York City.

Composer and pianist Sean Friar grew up in Los Angeles, where his first musical experiences were in rock and blues piano improvisation. His music keeps in touch with the energy and communicative directness of those musical roots, now along with an expansive and exploratory classical sensibility that is “refreshingly new and solidly mature… and doesn’t take on airs, but instead takes joy in the process of discovery [and] in the continual experience of suspense and surprisethat good classical music has always championed.” (Slate Magazine).

He regularly composes for ensembles within and outside traditional concert music. His output ranges from works for orchestra and chamber ensembles to a junk car percussion concerto, music for laptop orchestra, and microtonal piano duo. He has received commissions from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Berlin Philharmonic Scharoun Ensemble, American Composers Orchestra, Alarm Will Sound, Ensemble Modern, Cabrillo Festival, New York Youth Symphony, Redlands Symphony, NOW Ensemble, the Eastman Wind Ensemble, the Curtis Institute, and Present Music. His music has been featured at festivals around the world including Aspen, Bang on a Can, Bowdoin, Cabrillo, Carlsbad, Chamber Music Conference of the East, GAUDEAMUS, International Young Composers Meeting, NASA, Norfolk, Nuova Consonanza, SONIC, the Venice Biennale, and the World Saxophone Congress. Also active as a pianist, Friar frequently performs with saxophonist Jeff Siegfried and recently debuted a new duo for amplified bassoon and piano with effects pedals with world-renowned Estonian bassoonist Martin Kuuskmann.

A winner of the Rome Prize, Friar has received awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Copland House, the Fromm Foundation at Harvard, Chamber Music America, ASCAP, Composer’s Inc., New Music USA, and the US Army Band. His music can be found on labels including New Amsterdam Records, Innova Recordings, Vox Novus, and Crescent Phase Records. In late 2021, his album-length composition for NOW Ensemble, Before and After, was released on New Amsterdam Records to international critical acclaim, being called “the existential void I want to crawl into like a hot bath on a cold night” by VAN Magazine. In January 2024, he was featured as composer and pianist on saxophonist Jeff Siegfried’s debut album, Shades (Parma Recordings).

Friar is Chair of Composition at the Lamont School of Music at the University of Denver. He also oversees summer composition programs at Sunset ChamberFest in Los Angeles, the Suncoast Composer Fellowship Program in Sarasota, and the Lamont Summer Academy in Denver. He previously taught composition at the University of Southern California and UCLA. He holds a Ph.D. in Music Composition from Princeton University and undergraduate degrees in Music and Psychology from UCLA. His principal teachers were Paul Chihara, Paul Lansky, Steven Mackey, and Dmitri Tymoczko.