Samita Sinha is an artist, composer, researcher, and educator whose practice is rooted in the voice and body. She has trained in Indian vocal traditions (North Indian classical and Bengali Baul folk), and has unraveled them through the body to create a new and multivalent language of vibration and transformation. Sinha has performed her work nationally and internationally, and received awards from the Mellon Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, National Performance Network, New York State Council on the Arts, and the Fulbright Foundation.  She is a Visiting Professor at Dartmouth College.

Ash Fure’s full-bodied sonic experiences work on the senses in startling ways. Called “purely visceral” and “staggeringly original” by The New Yorker, Fure’s live performances and total installations mobilize the elemental force of sound, the social muscle of listening and our animal capacity to sense. Winner of a 2025 Creative Capital Grant, Fure has also received two Lincoln Center Emerging Artists Awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rome Prize in Music Composition, a DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Prize, an FCA Grant for Artists, a Fulbright Fellowship to France, a Stuttgart Composition Prize, a Darmstadt Kranichsteiner Musikpreis, and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship from Columbia University. Fure holds a PhD in Music Composition from Harvard University, is Associate Professor of Sonic Arts at Dartmouth College and served as co-artistic director of The Industry LA in 2021-2024.

Sunder Ganglani is an artist who works in collaboration between forms: music, theater, civil disobedience, pedagogy, performance. As a former Co-Artistic Director of The Foundry Theater in New York City his works with W. David Hancock, Ariana Reines, Claudia Rankine, David Greenspan, Melanie Joseph and many others have toured nationally and internationally, and won all kinds of awards. More recently his work has focused on music and justice – as a dramaturg he’s made operas and new experiments in music with Esperanza Spalding, Helga Davis, Charlotte Brathwaite, Justin Hicks, and Darius Jones. As a musician, composer, and organizer he’s grateful to have a creative home with The Stop Shopping Choir community in New York City where he works with Billy Talen, Savitri D, and the 45 member choir as chosen family.

The career of Sunny Jain is a celebration of cultural diaspora: deep-rooted tradition that ripples outward, changing – and being changed by – the cultures that it touches. He is a drummer, composer and thought leader. He’s toured the globe with the pioneering band he founded in 2008, Red Baraat, with highlight performances at The White House (Obama), London Olympics, Peter Gabriel’s Womad festivals. He joined legendary percussionists Mickey Hart, Zakir Hussain, Giovanni Hidalgo & Planet Drum for a reunion show in 2022 at Frost Amphitheater, CA. Jain is Smithsonian Folkways Recordings artist and has appeared on NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert series three times. Twice with Red Baraat (ranked #8 best Tiny Desk by New York Magazine) and most recently with his Wild Wild East band. He was a 2024 Visiting Scholar / Artist in Residence at Wesleyan University in CT, where he developed his first music theatrical show, Love Force. Jain was musical director for London-based, OBIE award winning show, The Jungle, and musical producer for Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding, The Musical. Jain is a 2025 Soho Repertory Theatre Commissioned Artist, a cultural pillar of New York City’s theater scene for the past 50 years.

Darrell Jones has performed in the United States and abroad with a variety of choreographers and companies such as Bebe Miller, Urban Bush Women, Ronald K. Brown, Min Tanaka, and Ralph Lemon. Along with performing, Darrell is a choreographer and a tenured faculty member at The Dance Center of Columbia College who has choreographed for professional and student ensembles (The Seldoms, University of Colorado, University of Illinois). He received choreographic fellowships from the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography and Chicago Dancemakers Forum. He is a two-time Bessie award recipient for his collaborative work with Bebe Miller Company and for his most recent research in (e)feminized ritual performance.

Daniel Neumann is a Brooklyn-based sound artist, organizer and audio engineer. He holds a masters degree in media art from the Academy of Visual Art Leipzig and studied electronic music composition. Neumann’s practice engages hybrid installation-performance formats to explore how sound interacts with space and how spaces can be shaped by sound. He thinks of sound as an interdisciplinary field enabled by audio procedures. Neumann’s works have been presented at Pinacoteca Bellas Artes Universidad de Caldas, Loop Barcelona, Moss Arts Center Blacksburg VA, Fergus McCaffrey Gallery, MoMA PS1, Knockdown Center, Pratt Institute, Eyebeam, Sculpture Center, Fridman Gallery and many other venues.

Sunil Bald has taught design studios, visualization courses, and theory seminars at YSOA since 2006. He served as Associate Dean from 2017-2024. Previously, he taught design and theory at Cornell University, Columbia University, the University of Michigan, and Parsons. Sunil co-found the New York-based Studio SUMO, which was featured as one of Architectural Record’s Design Vanguard and the Architectural League of New York’s Emerging Voices. In 2015, SUMO was awarded the Annual Prize in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. SUMO’s work ranges in scale, type, and site from installations and exhibitions to institutional buildings in the United States and Asia and has been exhibited in institutions including the National Building Museum, MoMA, the Venice Biennale, the Field Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, and Tokyo’s GA Gallery, and the Urban Center. Sunil’s research into architecture and culture in both Brazil and Japan has been supported by fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the Graham Foundation, New York State Council for the Arts, and the New York Fellowship for the Arts.

Sarai Frazier, a Bessie-nominated lighting designer, production manager, and artist, born and raised in New York City. Her creative and artistic practice exists across live events, performance art, immersive installations, and theater, always drawn to collaboration and care. She has a practice in pedagogy started by teaching lighting design and tech workshops for technicians, and over time, expanded to helping artists deepen their understanding of lighting design as well – helping them see it not just as a tool, but as a language of its own. She’s drawn to lighting as a medium that can hold, shape, and shift meaning — a way to see, feel, and listen differently. She is particularly interested in lighting design as its own expressive form—one that invites viewers to see, engage, and interact, while supporting and expanding storytelling.