EtM Ridgewood Bushwick Composer Residency 2016-2018

The EtM Ridgewood Bushwick Composer Residency was an EtM residency program active for two years in partnership with RiseBoro Community Partnership (formally the Ridgewood Bushwick Senior Citizens Council). The program was the second implementation of our Queens Workspace Initiative, to provide free, long-term studio space to composers who are in need of a dedicated workspace outside of their home.

The residency provided one composer with use of consistent, suitable rehearsal space over a six-month period to develop and create new work at RiseBoro Community Partnership’s Plaza de Los Ancianos. 

Previous Composers-in-Residence

Gelsey Bell (2017-18)

Singer, songwriter, and scholar Gelsey Bell has been described by the New York Times as an “imaginative” “winning soprano” whose performance of her own music is “virtuosic” and “glorious noise.” She is a core member of thingNY, Varispeed, and the Chutneys. In 2017, she received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. Recently she appeared on Broadway as Princess Mary in Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812. She has a PhD from NYU in Performance Studies

Randall Woolf (2016-17)

Randall Woolf’s music integrates other music, from  hiphop to blues to romantic to psychedelia. He has collaborated with Maurice Sendak, filmmakers Mary Harron and John C. Walsh, choreographers Lar Lubovitch and Heidi Latsky, writers Valeria Vasilevski, Tongo Eisen-Martin, and Liza Jessie Peterson, and art-rock legend John Cale. He has worked with Cale as an arranger, adding orchestral instruments to over 40 of his songs. His work has been performed by Kathleen Supové, Jennifer Choi, Timothy Fain, Mary Rowell, Ethel, conductor and flutist Ransom Wilson, Tara O’Connor, Lindsey Goodman, the Brooklyn Philharmonic, Kronos Quartet,Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, Sonic Generator, American Composers Orchestra, and others.

This program was supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.