A soloist musician, composer and vibrant collaborator, Laura Ortman (White Mountain Apache) creates across multiple platforms, including recorded albums, live performances, and filmic and artistic soundtracks. She has collaborated with artists such as Tony Conrad, Jock Soto, Raven Chacon, Nanobah Becker, Okkyung Lee, Martin Bisi, Jeffrey Gibson, Caroline Monnet, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Demian DinéYazhi, New Red Order, and In Defense of Memory. An inquisitive and exquisite violinist, Ortman is versed in Apache violin, piano, electric guitar, keyboards, and amplified violin, often sings through a megaphone, and is a producer of capacious field recordings.
She has performed at The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Guggenheim, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, Artists Space, Venice Biennale, The Stone residency, The New Museum, imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival, The Toronto Biennial, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, among countless established and DIY venues in the US, Canada, and Europe.
Ortman is the recipient of the 2023 Institute of American Indian Arts Artist-In-Residence, 2022 Forge Project Fellowship, 2022 United States Artists Fellowship, 2022 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists, 2020 Jerome@Camargo Residency in Cassis, France, 2017 Jerome Foundation Composer and Sound Artist Fellowship, 2016 Art Matters Grant, 2016 Native Arts and Culture Foundation Fellowship, 2015 IAIA’s Museum of Contemporary Native Arts Social Engagement Residency, 2014-15 Rauschenberg Residency, and 2010 Artist-in-Residence at Issue Project Room. She was also a participating artist in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Ortman lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Zach Layton is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, improviser, curator, and educator working collaboratively across genres and disciplines. His work has explored diverse musical approaches to biofeedback and brainwave signal, transcriptions of insect rhythms for string orchestra, sonification of internet data, multichannel sound installations, and photographic representation of sonic vibration. At Zebulon he will perform using a unique 17-string electric bass which he uses in his experimental “doom jazz” trio “Nepenthae”. (Nepenthae.bandcamp.com)
He has composed orchestral music for the Cleveland Chamber Symphony and the String Orchestra of Brooklyn and has performed and exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum, the Kitchen, MoMa/PS1, ISSUE Project Room, Roulette, EMPAC, Eyebeam, International Computer Music Festival, Experimental Intermedia, Performa, Transmediale Berlin, Audio Art Festival Krakow and many other venues in New York and worldwide.
He has collaborated with a diverse range of artists and musicians including
Vito Acconci, Pauline Oliveros, Tony Conrad, MV Carbon, Laura Ortman, Elliott Sharp, Nick Hallett, Bradley Eros, Ben Vida, Joshua White, David Grubbs, Loren Connors, Luke Dubois, and many more. He was co-curator of the PS1/MoMa WarmUp festival from 2007-9, Issue Project Room from 2007-2013, guest curator for the Guggenheim Museum from 2012-2015 and co-founder of the celebrated NYC Darmstadt music series . He has received awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2015 music/sound), the Macdowell Fellowship, and the Jerome and Fulbright Foundations. His opera/installation “all that is seen and unseen” created in partnership with Lauren Petty and Shaun Irons, is currently in view as part of the Harvestworks Governors’ Island residency in nyc.
