LaFrae Sci a.k.a Frae-Frae Daughter of Drexciya is an imaginationist, educator, composer, and sound scientist (physics) with a career spanning 30 years and 40 countries. Her creative process embraces DIY, modular and hardware synths. As a composer, she writes for theater, film, and large and extended jazz and classical orchestras. Her bold adventures in electronic music are informed by her vibrantly expansive music grounded in blues, jazz, classical, various ethnomusicological traditions.

Perhaps her proudest achievement yet, LaFrae was appointed executive director of williemaerockcamp.org in 2020. She has spearheaded the organization’s expansion to a full
suite of year-round, STEM-informed programming – currently serving over 600 girls in NYC. She has extensive experience developing music education programs in the United States and internationally. Bedrock to her artistry is the roots and the fruits of the blues from spirituals to Afro-diasporic futuristic soundscapes that explore time travel, prayer, meditation, and the African American ecstatic tradition. In her own words: “Black music’s beat and expression is one of our most powerful tools for justice and liberation—it unifies, heals, and mobilizes the spirit when it is necessary. It combines storytelling with rhythms and patterns, and it’s Futuristic. Black music resonates from some other world. It takes you places you have yet to imagine”

Ben Shirken is a New York-based artist whose work spans installation, generative music and film, audiovisual performance, and contemporary dance. His practice interrogates how our current tools for immaterial communication and production fundamentally alter our relationships to one another, yielding alternative futures. He is currently examining the conflicts resulting from the development of digital networks & automated systems through the sounds of machinic labor. His work and performances have been presented at a range of institutions and festivals, including Pioneer Works, Cannes, Artissima, WSA, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New Museum, Sustain Release and Dripping Music & Arts Festival. Shirken is the founder of record label and performance series 29 Speedway, and is currently pursuing an MFA in Sound Art at Columbia University

Dorothy Carlos is an experimental cellist and composer working in improvised performance and spatial audio. Her work utilizes extended techniques and digital manipulation merging free improvisation and computer music. She is interested in electronics as an opportunity to construct alternate realities. Solo performances have been presented internationally by Experimental Sound Studio Chicago, Bemis Center, e-flux Bar Laika, default, Center for New Music and Associated Technologies at UC Berkeley, Sustain-Release, Chicago Jazz String Summit, and Big Ears Festival. Dorothy has been featured as a collaborator on projects presented at the Swiss Institute (New York), Night Gallery (Los Angeles), Artists Space (New York), Issue Project Room (New York), Performance Space (New York), Untitled Art Fair (Miami), Gaudeamus Festival (Utrecht, NL), Emerging Change Festival (Berlin), and the Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art. Her work has been featured in The Wire, New York Times, Artforum, Bandcamp, Chicago Tribune, and The Quietus, and released with 29 Speedway, Random Man Editions, and D.O.T. Audio Arts. Dorothy holds a Bachelor’s degree from NYU where she studied classical cello and anthropology on full scholarship and an MFA in sound from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
(Photo by Evan Ray Suzuki)

An ongoing collaboration between artists Sarah Rara and Luke Fischbeck, lucky dragons research forms of participation and dissent, purposefully working towards a better understanding of existing ecologies through performances, publications, recordings, and public art. lucky dragons have presented collaborative work in a wide variety of contexts, including REDCAT, LACMA, MOCA and The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, London’s Institute for Contemporary Art, The Kitchen in New York, the 54th Venice Biennale, Documenta 14, The Whitney Museum of American Art (as part of the 2008 Whitney Biennial) and The Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, among others. The name “lucky dragons” is borrowed from a fishing vessel that was caught in the fallout from H-bomb tests in the mid-1950’s, an incident which sparked international outcry and gave birth to the worldwide anti-nuclear movement.